Let me tell you about why I love London.
The first time I travelled via London Underground, in that more innocent world of the early summer of 2001, I hopped on a wrong train. The second time, I accidentally chose the wrong direction. The third time I went the right way, but picked the wrong one among the two Northern Line forks. The signage was supremely confusing and yet, today, the designer in me and the commuter in me both cite the Tube as one of the marvels of the world, and I have an entire shelf devoted to books about it.
I’m clearly biased. But this is neither a public transit story, nor a design story. This, my friend, is a story of this photograph:
Yes, you’re free to stop laughing at my mustache any time you want. My pornstar name, as one site helpfully suggests today, would be Captain Hard. (What would Captain Hard need to do to get promoted to Admiral?) Mind you, this is London, early summer of 2001. I didn’t know any better. I was young. I needed money. It was my first real trip abroad.
Joking aside, I was in the U.K. for about two weeks, meeting up with a couple of my Internet friends (most of them coming from outside of Poland; all of them gay, which in a fascinating way made me the odd duck), our main goal being that one short-lived Pet Shop Boys musical, Closer to heaven.
We spent a couple of days wandering around London — record stores in Soho, Hyde Park, typical touristy places — and finally, the musical night came. It was by no means a good musical, plot- and dialogue-wise at times downright embarrassing, rightfully cancelled soon afterwards. But since it had songs by my then-beloved group, I’ve never actually seen a musical before and, frankly, I don’t have much in terms of taste, I had a pretty great time. All of us did, as a matter of fact, and right there on the spot we bought some leftover tickets for the following day.
After the show, we went to catch the Tube back to our hotel. At the platform, I thought I noticed someone familiar sitting against the wall. I pulled one of my friends aside and asked him “Hey, wasn’t she in the musical?” She was. Without really thinking about what I was about to do, I approached her, confirmed that she was indeed the lead actress, and then asked her if I could have a photo with her. Stacey said yes; we all hopped on the train, talked about the musical for a couple of stops, until eventually she was called back to the world above us.
When we arrived at the hotel, I went for a walk. It was one of those beautiful summer London days actually summery, with a warm drizzle and a wonderful smell in the air that I’m looking forward to whenever I visit again (I always pick the same little family hotel up North for that very reason). And I couldn’t stop thinking about what happened.
In the years since, I remember singular events that cast certain skills and professions in a new light; events that made me appreciate and admire them in a way I never thought possible. A couple of years ago, my friend sent me an unexpected email that made me realize the power and beauty that could be unleashed just by one’s pen. Last year, I saw Bear McCreary impulsively jump to a piano in front of a big crowd and play a short piece for his fiancée. I looked at music and musicians differently ever since.
That evening in London, I understood the power one wields as an actor. For two hours in that little theatre, all of our eyes were on Stacey, admiring her performance — and then we almost passed her at the station, as if she was just another random Londoner. I was amazed and, frankly, a bit jealous at her ability to transform herself into such a different creature (and she was very different on the stage) at will.
And what, as you already know, did I do instead of telling her all this? I behaved like a regular tourist and asked her for a photo.
I decided to fix that. I rushed back into the hotel, and wrote a letter to her, saying all of the above, and more. The next day we went to see the musical again, and before the show I asked someone in the theatre staff to pass it on to Stacey. I can’t any more recall the exact contents of the letter, but I still remember what I said to the guy I handed it off to: “Don’t worry, it’s neither a love letter, nor a hate letter.”
We loved the show even more than the first time and, again, we bought tickets for the next day. That next day, after the show, some of the guys stayed to hunt the remaining actors down and complete their autograph collection. The rest of us who didn’t really care much about the autographs, myself included, went downtown. An hour or so later, as we reconvened in a random London pub, one of the guys brought back some news. “Marcin, she was talking about your letter all the time” — I didn’t even sign it, but one of my friends knew it was me who wrote it — “and she regretted you weren’t there.”
We were all leaving London the next morning — the rest of the posse was heading back home, and I was supposed to visit my family in the Wales. But I didn’t want this to be the ending. Ungrateful bastard as I must have appeared to be, I apologized to my family, and… grabbed a train to London the next day. I went to see the show again, and after that I waited for Stacey outside. When she emerged, I point blank asked her if she would like to have tea with me. (I did say just that. “Would you like to have some tea with me?” It felt appropriately British.)
She did not have time for tea. But what she had time for was even better — she took me back to the theatre, then to the little pub underneath, and for an hour I was there, sitting with her, and all the cast, and the director, and the Pet Shop Boys themselves.
She asked me if I’d like some autographs, or a photo, or anything at all as a souvenir, but I didn’t care. (The fact that I’d be able to remember and eventually write it down was everything I needed.) We talked about our careers, her squatting in some apartment a while back, some Polish words she knew. Then I walked her to the bus. I still remember her mention that she could only drive in circles — hence the bus — and me joking that we look like exact opposites: I was wearing all black; she was wearing all white. We ended up at the bus stop at Tottenham Court Road, she smiled in a way I still remember, kissed me goodnight, and jumped on one of those unmistakably British double-deckers.
I couldn’t sleep that night.
I have been to London a couple of times since. I read many books and watched many movies about it. I’ve heard and read and re-read and told and re-told many stories — John Snow fighting with cholera, Edward Johnston drafting his famous typeface, Peter Saville and Mark Farrow designing album covers in the 1980s, the King’s Cross Fire of 1987, the dark days of The Blitz — and lived vicariously through all the friends that visited it when I couldn’t. (That might actually include you.)
I found friends in cities themselves, too. Chicago, New York, Rio de Janeiro, unequivocally. Zürich, uncomfortably. Detroit, in absentia. But that July night a decade ago was when I first fell in love with a city — the one that happened to be wrapped around Thames. I don’t know what Stacey’s up to, and I doubt she remembers any of this. But I do. Once in a while I watch one of the U.K. episodes of The office, or listen to the musical. All of this comes back for a second then and I find myself smiling again, just as I did that whole night when I was walking the dark, empty streets of London.
— San Francisco, 2007–2011.