- Chloe Riley
- Chicago director Jake Fruend holding a photo of John, a mysterious friend from his grandmother’s past
Sometimes, like the trumpets on Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” great art is born of dreams. But other times it’s happenstance—you throw back one too many glasses of champagne with your grandma, and the next thing you know, you’re staging a play about her life. Just ask Chicago-based director Jake Fruend. Several months ago and after several glasses of bubbly, Fruend’s grandmother Diana opened up to him about a friendship she shared with an openly gay neighbor as a teen in San Diego in the 1950s. The neighbor, John—a photographer and dabbler in short film—ultimately became ill and mysteriously vanished from Diana’s childhood neighborhood.
Diana Fruend: The Saint Louis Art Museum’s got a beautiful restaurant overlooking the lake there, and Jake came down about a year or so ago, and we met at the art museum and had lunch. And, I don’t know, I think he’d had one glass of champagne, I don’t think he was drunk or anything, but we got to chitchatting about stuff. I don’t even know how the subject got brought up, but I just started telling him a little bit about this one guy that I knew for about five years when I was in junior high. And he was just a really good guy; he was a best friend to my family. I guess what started it is that I said, my family and I have always believed that he died of AIDS before there was AIDS because of the way my mom described how bad he went. He’d come over and she’d say that he just looked so awful and gaunt. And Jake thought that was kind of intriguing, and he went and turned that into a story.
In the play, the character based on your father films the sunset and makes his family watch the movies. Did that really happen?
