Almost, Maine was a series of romantic vignettes staged in Haus Mitt’s backyard and directed by sophomore Patty Hamilton. The play is a close relative of “Love, Actually,” except in “Love, Actually” your boyfriend won’t shrink two and a half feet because you left him and no one carries around their broken heart in a Ziploc baggie.

I would have liked to bring a sweet devoted boyfriend with a Creative Writing minor and —let’s be honest— a CS Major to “Almost, Maine,” but instead I brought Daniel:

A definition platonic best friend nursing a Winter Quarter heartbreak and lacking the requisite ass tissue that allows most humans to sit on hard surfaces—like the ground— without feeling pain.

This detail regarding his doily-thin behind might appear superfluous, extraneous, or altogether dumb, but I promise that Daniel’s fanny sensitivity heavily shaped my experience. For starters, the show took place outdoors and instead of joining the ranks of the dozens and dozens of cute snuggling pairs, we spent the majority of the play forming a human sigmoid function1: my friend used half the blanket to cushion his pancake butt and I wrapped the remainder around my shoulders.

The play required that you got up and moved to another location after each scene: Gluteus Sensitivus and I did not fare well in these transitions.

Almost, Maine is in essence a rom-com, and I’d like to believe that the intent of most rom-coms is to bolster you with renewed enthusiasm for the power of love and encourage you to go out there and slice yourself off a piece of that love pie. And not as it were to make you face life’s uncomfortable questions:

1. What do you mean nobody’s ever rendered your likeness in acrylic paint and then tried to make out with you?

2. Jesus, are you even a woman?

I’ve been devouring rom-coms since the third grade, when I watched “Two Weeks Notice” at a sleepover and developed an age-inappropriate crush on Hugh Grant. My parents’ 30 years of supportive and loving marriage is like whatever, but I’m still waiting for a billionaire to stop the demolition of a community center for the express purpose of winning my affection.2

Daniel and I spent the entirety of “Almost, Maine” aw-ing and smiling through our fingers, because the scenes—if a little haphazard—were sweet.

The brief exceptions to this being moments that I interpreted as problematic. There was one scene in particular where beneath the adorable actors and tones of magical realism, we watched a man force himself on a total stranger despite her repeated protests. Watching the female character attempting to mourn the death of her ex-boyfriend while fending off a stranger’s aggressive make out attempts made me “aw” for very different reasons.

These moments aside, I will always love school plays, because they let you to see people you know or could know do something inherently vulnerable. Additionally, every actor pair seemed vaguely—fuck it, downright—improbable and seeing the really good-looking guy with the delicate features of a Disney Princess shacking up with the cute bookworm type really brought me back to my high school days.3

The play ended and instead of feeling my heart congeal in icy bitterness a lá Frozen, I felt a little bit lighter. My friend liked it too, and we talked about the show as we biked home together.

And actually, we talked all night.

It was amazingly easy to confide in him all my hopes, dreams, and fears—namely, that one day someone would discover that I had cast 670 ballots for myself and had, as many suspected but did not voice, rigged the junior class Homecoming court.

And as the sun slowly rose over the roof of Kappa Alpha we realized that maybe a little bit of “Almost, Maine”’s magic had seeped in our bitter academically driven hearts.

Kidding.

Daniel and I saw the show, and biked home in relative silence save for the sounds of his insufficiently protected tailbone scraping against his Lycra bike seat.

[1] Oh, really? You didn’t know what a sigmoid function was..?
Hey, Oberlin called! They still want you.

Mariah Oxley (‘16, English) is from Minneapolis, “The Pittsburgh of the Midwest.”