Have a going away party.

There is a difference between typing the e-mail addresses of everyone you know into a g-mail “to” field and seeing those e-mail addresses arrive as people at your going away party. There are a lot of differences.

When you go through your Facebook friends slash brain to be sure you have everyone included it’s a simple process of see name, think about person, invite or cut off from life entirely (Wait. Sorry. That’s the process of determining who to inform that you have a new cell phone number, which I also did last week).

But when you see those people gathered to say goodbye as you embark on a new phase of life in a city 3K miles away it becomes much more than a “let’s have a drink.” Each person is like a flood of memories/thoughts/mistakes/successes that can’t separated from the whole experience of your time in the city and yet, in many circumstances, don’t know about each others’ existence.

Meredith who co-founded Effable Arts, the theater group that produced my first play has no idea that David, sitting at the bar, was the person who made me get serious about the blog that Meredith’s co-founder Kim found on Facebook, started following, showed Meredith, and decided should become some form of play. And neither of them know Andrew, my good friend from Florence, who inspired a character in that play . Andrew doesn’t even know about that. (Well. Didn’t.) Without Dave there would be no Meredith, and without Andrew what resulted would be wildly different.

It’s a mind trip. You sit there like this puppet master with no control of the puppets – like an audience member in the scene you’ve been acting in for 5+ years (though there were people there who I’ve known for 26).

And then – to make matters all-the-more bizarre – everyone gets drunk and monologues at you about what you mean to them, what you’re about to experience in LA, and precisely what they think about that.