Today is National Friendship Day and it makes me think about Sarah. Sarah and I were not friends. Until the bus crash.
It was 1994, and we were performing in a European tour of “On the Town.” That evening we had performed near Hamburg and had boarded the bus for an all-night trip to Munich. Around midnight, my fellow castmates, orchestra members, and myself were hunkered down for the eight-hour journey.
Suddenly, the bus driver started yelling, and I felt the bus careen across the road and lift off its wheels. I grabbed the seat in front of me, shut my eyes, and braced myself. The bus flipped and flipped again, finally coming to a stop at the bottom of a hill.
I opened my eyes, saw the night sky, and crawled toward it. Headlights from cars on the highway cast eerie shadows over the suitcases, clothing, glass, and metal littering the hillside. At the top of the hill, I saw a tiny form sitting in the mud.
“Sarah?” I called out.
Thankfully, everyone survived. Sarah and I escaped with minor injuries and wound up as roommates when the tour company put us up in a hotel to recuperate.
We hadn’t spent much time together on the tour because we didn’t have a lot in common. I was a singer from the Deep South who cross-stitched backstage and never went anywhere without perfect hair, nails and makeup. Sarah was a tomboy dancer from Colorado who spent her free time hiking and exploring castles.
But something clicked in those weeks after the crash. Stuck in a hotel room for days, we played cards, consoled each other after disturbing nightmares, and mourned when the remaining tour dates were canceled.
Back in New York, we hung out together in our low-rent apartments — mine had cockroaches, hers had mice. She invited me to parties; I took her to documentaries. I’d buy her cheap clothes at sample sales; she fed me linguini from the restaurant where she waited tables. She convinced me to run a marathon, and I convinced her to volunteer with me at a homeless shelter. When I became a licensed NYC tour guide, I practiced all my new tours on her.
We worked many odd jobs to pay the rent. One year, we presented new toys at the annual Toy Fair. She spent hours hopping around the room on a pogo stick, while I showed off a gender-neutral doll (way ahead of its time in 2000!) who would say things like “Let’s wrestle! Wow, you’re strong!” At the end of the two-week gig, we helped each other hobble home; Sarah, because her knees had finally given out, and me, because I’d been driven half-mad from that doll’s annoying voice.
One summer, Sarah and I both signed up for the newest thing in dating: Match.com. Incredibly, we both met our husbands. She danced at my wedding, and I sang at hers. Our husbands became good friends, and we were delighted our marriages strengthened our friendship.
Brian and I moved into an apartment with an amazing view of the World Trade Center. We were standing on our balcony on Sept. 11, 2001, when a jet flew into the South Tower. As the towers burned and collapsed, we fled our apartment and became trapped in the smoke in Battery Park. We were eventually evacuated by boat to New Jersey, and as I washed glass and ash off our dog, Gabriel, in a hotel bathtub, I called Sarah.
We arrived at her Hell’s Kitchen doorstep the next day, traumatized and needing a place to crash. The four of us were inseparable in the aftermath, watching the news, wandering the empty streets, and reading posters of the missing. We cried in unison when Gabriel died from the effects of 9/11 toxins he had inhaled and ingested.
Almost 30 years later, we act like an old married couple. I beg her to quit drinking so much soda, and she begs me to upgrade my skincare routine. She was horrified when she caught me washing my face with dish soap and yelled, “I’m giving up on you!”
But I know she won’t.
Nowadays, Sarah has bad knees from her time as a professional dancer, and I have sore feet from tour-guiding, but we’re still running, side by side, through all of life’s adventures.
This is dedicated to ride-or-die friends everywhere.
Ray Stanton is author of “Out of the Shadow of 9/11: An Inspiring Tale of Escape and Transformation.”