Best Conversations Ever

I had this vision that some big television executive asked me to pick three celebrities that I would love to spend a day with. No, I did not say Leonardo DiCaprio first, as some of you who may know me would think I would considering he and I were married back in 1997. Anyways, no, my first choice would be Tom Hardy. Why, you ask? He’s an addict, and he’s open about his struggles with addiction, and how a 12 step program helped him recover.

Do I find him attractive? Well, yes of course. He’s quite dashing, isn’t he? And in such a real life, beaten down, grungy sort of way that I absolutely adore. I look at myself in the mirror and see the same sort of beautifully broken grungy reflection staring back at me. So I guess you could say that my fixation with Mr. Hardy is that I feel a life connection to the man.

What does a day with Tom Hardy look like to me? First, we meet early in the morning for breakfast because we will need our strength for our first adventure at Shenandoah National Park, and we hike my favorite mountain ever, Old Rag. If you’ve never been I suggest you do it, and do the whole thing, the loop and all. You’ll think it never ends but trust me, you’ll make it. After we’ve cleaned up, we go for lunch. We ask each other questions and have conversation. By this time I’m sure we have shared loads of stories about our journey through addiction, about who we were before we found recovery. We probably asked each other your typical “first date” questions like, “what’s your favorite movie?” Or “do you like The Office?” And my favorite, “what cartoon voices can you do really well?” I can do Lois from Family Guy and Marge Simpson, but this isn’t about my amazing talents! Back to a day with Tom!

After lunch, or you might even call it linner, or dunch, depending on the time I suppose, we head to New Dominion Bookshop Rose Garden, it’s a sort of secret place in Virginia that I never got to visit on my trip there this past summer. Obviously we check out the book store, and we talk books. I pick his brain, he picks mine, and we keep asking questions and having that conversation. We visit the rose garden and take cell phone pictures. It would be magical, and not even in that romantic sort of way I don’t think either. There is something beautiful about two people who share the same incurable disease and have some of the same dark experiences as you do. It’s hard to explain to someone who’s never seen the darkness.

By this time it’s getting late, so we pick a place for dinner. Somewhere open, The Ivy Inn, Hamilton’s, though I think they close at 7:30 and I imagine it would be around 9 o’clock at this point. But we find something. Or maybe we don’t, we might end up feeling full enough and just hit a Walmart and buy snacks for later.

Now our day is coming to an end and we head back to our hotel. Separate rooms of course, Toms a married man, and I am a lady, a sort of dude-ish lady but still a lady. And we say our goodbyes. But before we head to our rooms, I ask Tom one last thing, “if you could go back in time, knowing what you know now, would you take that opportunity to do it over?” Hmm...I wonder what he would say. The End.