Ye Olde Antique Shoppe

So, I spent a summer in Scotland when a play of mine  ran in the Edinburgh Festival.  It was received really well and was a big success.  In the cast was an actor who is now a huge star, I won't name names but he now has a hit tv show and is in the Wolverine series.  We had triumphs, trials, victories, laughs and worked hard.  Finally we had a day off, and a few of us decided to rent a car and toodle about the Scottish country side.

The landscape, like the Scotts themselves, is lovely.  We saw ancient castles, lochs, mountains and shades of green I never knew existed before.

So we discover this lovely Scottish town, and on the High Street we find a parking spot in front of Ye Olde Antique Shoppe..  And low and behold we discover we have a flat.  The owner of Ye Olde Antique Shoppe comes out to see what happened.  He asks us where we are from – all 4 of us are New Yorkers.  He tell us he’s been to New York and went to a Bar Mitzvah on Long Island, and that he’s Jewish and Gay.  Three of us were Jewish and Ben is Gay, and all of us have been involved with theatre our whole lives.  The homing pigeon found it’s own kind.  What were the chances!  It was as if a huge cosmic magnet pulled us to this very location.  We chatted, laughed and then our new friend had customers he had to attend to.

It was time to get to the matter at hand.   None of us had ever changed a flat before.  Tom and Ben were valiant, found the spare, the tools and a book on how to change a flat.  One of them grabs the tool, as the other reads the instructions out.  A man sees this and walks by shaking his head in disbelief.

Our new friend from the Shoppe comes out to see how the progress is going. Slowly, we tell him.  We ask if he knows how to change a tire.  He said, not really.  I tell him, you don’t want to get greasy anyway.  Our new friend, slaps his thighs, lifts his hands up in the air and said in his Scottish brogue, “You can grease me right up!”  With that he pivots and returns to his store to attend to new customers.

The man who shook his head came back.  Let me help, he said.  Within 5 minutes he changed the tire. We thanked him profusely.  I never saw anyone read the book, he said in his Scottish brogue.  He might have repeated this several times.  And then he went on his merry way.

We said our fond farewells to our friend in Ye Olde Antique Shoppe, he promised he would visit us in NY and we reconvened our toodling.

Sometimes you luck out, make new friends and rely on the kindness of strangers.