September is here and it’s scary for me. It’s my birthday month. I remember when that meant a party, crepe paper streamers over the table, paper hats, a cake, presents and kids I didn’t know at my house.
For that date only, I was the star.
I won’t tell you the date because you would feel obligated to send me gifts, and I would then have to write thank-you notes. I hate thank-you notes. Then people would write back and thank me for the note and on and on.
J.P. Devine is seen in his younger years in this undated photo. Photo courtesy of J.P. Devine
To shake things up this year, I am considering offering one time only an autographed picture of myself, you know, those 8-by-10 black and white shots I used to carry around New York when looking for work.
These will be photos of myself when I was a young actor. You don’t want a current photo. I have an unruly colic this morning.
But here’s one at such a birthday party. Check that expression. Send your address and a stamped envelope, and I’ll send one to you.
OK, let’s start with the sign stuff. The bookstores are full of stuff about astrology. This is what they say about Virgo.
“You’re dedicated, resourceful, helpful, hardworking, health-conscious, analytical, clever, witty, and practical.” Wow! That’s uncanny. Have these guys been following me around?
Then you turn the page and there’s more.
“You can also be preachy, self-destructive, anxious, overwhelmed, self-pitying, uptight, and critical.” Who’s that?
You’re a Virgo, right? Sound like you? Of course. They got us right, didn’t they? No? They didn’t? Ask that human you sleep with.
In my New York youth, before I knew anything about “signs,” I was always attracted to girls without caring if they were Scorpio or Pisces.
At first I had bad luck with girls in Manhattan. I always wound up with one who shared a one bedroom with a vegetarian girl who read Proust, never went out, had no wine in the fridge. My girl had a former boyfriend who wouldn’t go away and hung outside her apartment with flowers. Bummer.
Then my first roommate, Joe Dunn — a nice-looking guy who had one front gray tooth where some fella had punched him on a picket line — changed everything.
Tired of hearing of my problems with finding a suitable girl with her own apartment, he laid it on the line.
“What’s your sign?”
“Virgo.”
“Well, that’s easy,” he said and gave me a copy of Linda Goodman’s “Sun Signs.”
Well, I’ll tell you, that changed my life on the spot.
Linda Goodman made it clear. Date Capricorns. Got that? Capricorns.
So for the rest of that year, I went from bars to parties to bat Mitzvahs, to weddings and funerals and political rallies looking for a suitable Capricorn. There were a few, but none appealed to me.
I remember asking a girl sitting next to me at auditions, what her “sign” was.
“Oh,” she said, with a curled lip and rolled eyes, “You’re one of those Linda Goodman people,” and turned away.
It turned out she was a Scorpio.
Then one day as I was at Bloomingdale’s Department Store on my way up to the Le Train Bleu Café on the sixth floor, there She was across the way on the down escalator. It was love at first sight.
I shouted, “WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?”
“CAPRICORN” She shouted back.
I responded. “YOU SEEING ANYONE?”
“NO!”
The rest is history.
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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