My one brief foray into acting

When I was a university student, I lived in a small apartment in a rather ramshackle building a few blocks from the campus.  Most of the other tenants there were also students, but my next-door neighbor was an older guy I'll call "NN" who lived there because he was poor and simply couldn't afford anything better.  He was around 45 and what some people would call "a bit of a character" -- rather frenetic and excitable and prone to talking without thinking things through first.  He had some of the same intellectual interests as I did and we quickly became friends.  NN was also homosexual, the first openly-gay person I had ever met.  (No, there was never a hint of anything sexual in his relationship with me.  He was just a friend.)

One day NN came by and said he'd come to ask for my help with something.  He had a sister living on the east coast, whom he thoroughly detested, and she was traveling to California for a few days.  She had asked him to let her stay in his apartment while she was there so she wouldn't have to pay for a hotel.  He had told her he couldn't accommodate her because he had a live-in boyfriend, and she had accepted that and gotten a hotel room.  However, now she was actually in town and wanted to come visit him for a couple of hours tomorrow afternoon, and he didn't want her to realize he'd been lying about having a live-in boyfriend.  Would I, he asked, be willing to hang out at his place just while she was visiting and pretend I lived there with him?

It was the oddest thing I had ever been asked to do up to that point, but I was still at the stage of relishing the independence of being away from home and trying new things, and it sounded like it could be fun, so I agreed. The next day I went over to NN's apartment a little while before his sister was due to get there.  When she arrived, she wasn't surprised to see me since he had told her he had someone living with him.  I don't remember much of what they talked about during her visit -- family stuff, mostly.

Deception takes more concentration than one might think.  I had to constantly watch what I said to avoid letting some tell-tale phrase slip out that would have betrayed the fact that I didn't actually live there.  But I managed it, and she never suspected anything.  People interpret what they see according to their expectations.  As it happened, a few weeks later I was visiting NN and the phone rang when he was busy in the kitchen, and he asked me to answer it and see who it was.  It was his sister, so the fact that I answered his phone added to the verisimilitude of the original ploy.

In all the decades since then, I've never had occasion to attempt such a deception again.  I was right at the time, though.  It was fun.

[Image at top:  Photo of the campus clock tower, taken by me around that time.  It's a scan of a physical photo, since this was long before digital cameras.]