The invitation came out of nowhere: instead of the usual office party, management booked us all seats at a classy theater downtown. Dress code? Formal. Plus-ones were welcome, and I took my girlfriend, not expecting much beyond polite applause and stale wine.<\/p>\n
But the real performance that night wasn\u2019t on stage.<\/p>\n
Midway through the second act, I noticed something odd. Two rows ahead sat a coworker, holding hands with his wife. But just one row back \u2014 and a few seats over \u2014 sat another woman. She didn\u2019t glance at him. He never looked her way. But something about the stillness in her posture screamed tension. My girlfriend leaned over and whispered, \u201cThey\u2019re pretending not to know each other.\u201d Sure enough, we realized we were watching a quiet tragedy unfold \u2014 a man juggling a lie and a mistress, both of whom were in the same room. And he was acting like this was perfectly normal.<\/p>\n
It made me think about all the ways people perform \u2014 not just on stage, but in life. The wife, calm and gracious. The mistress, holding back a storm just to catch a glimpse of something that looked like love. And him, the lead in a private drama that deserved no audience.<\/p>\n
Later, over drinks, nobody talked about the play. But we all remembered the other act \u2014 the one unfolding just a few seats away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The invitation came out of nowhere: instead of the usual office party, management booked us all seats at a classy theater downtown. Dress code? Formal. Plus-ones were welcome, and I took my girlfriend, not expecting much beyond polite applause and stale wine. But the real performance that night wasn\u2019t on stage. Midway through the second …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6649,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6648"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6648\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6650,"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6648\/revisions\/6650"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}