Michael

There was a dark time in my life—let us just call it “high school”—when I stayed up until 2 AM most every Saturday night watching two syndicated episodes of ER back-to-back. You wouldn’t have known it from looking at me—or, indeed, from talking with me, for I like to think I was very good at pretending to have watched every last minute of the previous weekend’s Saturday Night Live and Showtime at the Apollo—but at some point in my adolescence I developed very strong attachments to the plot lines that developed and cast members who emerged in those golden seasons between the departure of Sherry Stringfield and the return of Sherry Stringfield.

There were some notable exceptions, of course, the most notable being any and all plot lines involving the cast member Michael Michele, whom I remember only for how terrible she was and—what brings me here now—her name, which I always regarded as an adding-insult-to-injury kind of deal, like, "It is one thing that her first name is Michael, but then to have her last name be Michele!" 

But I am older, and wiser, and on reflection what was once puzzlement has slipped into something resembling admiration. It helps, too, that during an equally dark period of my life, my early twenties, I moved to Chicago for the first time, where I took this photograph:

I never would have believed you if you had told me when I was fifteen that I would one day seek solace in an intersection that evokes Dr. Peter Benton. But people change. They grow, they open themselves up to the possibility of new experiences and new takes on things. I still find Michael Michele's name remarkable, her acting less than passable, but nonetheless I thank her.