Monday Can't Act
Every Sunday at about six, the man next door starts Monday early.
We live in two halves of one house, with a low fence between the back gardens. His kitchen window looks across it at my back step, where I sit most Sunday evenings until dark. He waves. I wave.
At six he sits at his table with a mug of tea and frowns at nothing. After dinner he wheels his bin down the garden to the back lane for Monday's collection, talking all the way down. Then he irons a shirt by the window, stopping now and then with the iron in his hand.
One Sunday, back from the lane, he stopped at the fence and told me what I'd been watching. He was doing Monday. The frowning over tea is his inbox, two hundred emails answered in his head, and the talking down the garden is the nine o'clock meeting. He gives a good answer to a question nobody will ask. The bin takes it well.
When he stops with the iron in his hand, that's his manager. He says she's perfectly nice. On Sunday nights, alone with Monday's shirt, he plays her himself. The long pause after she reads his report, iron in hand. The little breath out through the nose. He showed me the breath. It's good. After that, he says, he irons the same collar twice, disappointed in himself on her behalf.
By bedtime he has done Monday once, and it went worse than it will.
The next evening he fetched the empty bin and I asked how it went. It went like a Monday. Some emails, most of them about the car park, and a nine o'clock that started late because another meeting had taken all the chairs, and nobody asked him anything. His manager read the report and said "fine". She'd brought biscuits, as she does every Monday.
Monday is almost never as good an actor as Sunday night makes it.
I ran the same rehearsal for about ten years, in bed on Sunday nights with the light off. I told myself I was getting ready, so Monday couldn't catch me out. But I wasn't getting ready for Monday. I was having it twice.
Most of the dread gets spent on Sunday night, on a Monday that never turns up. Some Mondays are as bad as the rehearsal. Even then, you only have to sit through it once.
What got me out was treating Sunday night like an audition. A few Sundays ago my neighbour was in his garden looking grey by five, so I told him over the fence. When the show starts, let Monday do its big speech. Then say what they say to actors, "Thanks, we'll let you know," out loud if you can, and let the bin be a bin.
He said he'd let me know.
Last Sunday at six he brought his tea out onto his back step and frowned at nothing for a minute. Then he said to the garden, "Thanks, we'll let you know," and laughed, and so did I, and we sat either side of the fence until dark, not talking about Monday. Later he took the bin down without a word to it.
On Monday the real one turned up, forgot half its lines, and brought biscuits.