155: Hoaxing Yourself (2000)

Sean Cole

And then there was this show that I would stay up really late and watch, and tape, and watch over and over again the tapes, called Dempsey & Makepeace. Which was about an American detective who went to London because he had been set up at home. And he was teamed up with a woman, who was this aristocrat named Lady Harriet Makepeace. And I was really on her side, I thought, she's got it going on.

Sean Cole

Oh yeah.

Sean Cole

And then it was just something that spiraled out of control. I know that eventually, I was just using an English accent literally from waking to sleeping. Morning, noon, and night.

Sean Cole

He was just really, he must-- I don't know the different schools of psychology, but he was really very confrontive. And he was like, well, you've got to stop doing this, he said, because you're not British. And my mom just sort of sat over next to me, and she sort of went, yeah, to agree with him. And to sort of help him in showing me this.

Sean Cole

Because that's what I was thinking. Like, there has to be a way that I could be British still.

Sean Cole

Yeah, exactly.

Sean Cole

It was second nature. It was first nature. To this day I have trouble saying, oh, I faked an accent for two years. I mean, I had an accent for two years.

Sean Cole

As close I can. OK. I'm going to take a sip of water here. Well, Ira, I had a salad. I had it at the Boston House of Pancakes-- er, Pizza, rather.

Sean Cole

It was a Snapple, just lemon-flavored. I don't really like the peach.

Joel Lovell

It was one of those first days of college, you know, when to spend a lot of time-- everybody kind of moves in hordes, and you spend a lot of time in each other's dorm rooms. And there were about, oh, I don't know, 10 or 11 of us in this one guy's room. And we were just like sitting around, eating pizza and talking. And people were talking about where they were from and what their parents did, stuff like that. And there was one guy whose dad was a doctor for the Knicks. There was another guy whose father was an elected representative from New York State. And then this other guy whose father was on the World Court. Literally was a member of the World Court.

Joel Lovell

And so it suddenly seemed like this incredibly impressive group to me. And they seemed sort of worldly in ways that was just beyond my wildest imagination. And worldly beyond what I am now, frankly.

And I remember sitting there at the time thinking, oh my God, I'm so out of my league here. And then, completely unplanned, I suddenly said, as a slice of pizza was passed to me, this pizza with sausage on top of it. I said, I can't take that because my parents are vegetarians. And then everybody in the room sort of turned and looked at me. Because it wasn't even as if I said well, I'm a vegetarian. But I said, my parents are vegetarians. And there's a sort of puzzled look on everybody in the room. And I said well, and I am too. I've never eaten meat. I'm not entirely-- well, I mean, I have some ideas now about why I said that. But at the time I had no idea what I was saying. It was like suddenly I'd become possessed. And I had to think of something to say about myself that seemed interesting. And vegetarianism was the thing that I chose.

Sean Cole

No, no. Never that I was from Britain. But in a way, that I was British, you know. There was a real distinction there for me. Like I'd taken it on. Like I was culturally British now.

Joel Lovell

Well, I think what it was is, I think I did some sort of calculus that took like an nanosecond in my head. And I thought, I can't actually lie about what my parents do. But I think the connections that I was making were this. That somehow, because I was from this town in the sticks, if my folks were vegetarians, then the whole history that that suggested was that they were sort of these kind of leftist academic radicals who had sort of dropped out of society and gone back to the land. And I was living in this bumpkin town in upstate New York, and my folks were living some sort of life that was driven by their political philosophy, rather than I was just a guy who grew up in upstate New York.

Sean Cole

I did the old kid thing of wishing that my real British parents would come and tell me I was adopted and take me back to London.

Joel Lovell

So I'm sitting there in the room and all these guys are looking at me. And they're like, dude, what do you eat? And suddenly I realized, in that moment, how little I knew about vegetarianism. I kind of tried to be real vague about it. You know, we eat salads and lentils. I remember saying lentils a lot.

Sean Cole

And there was a gap, certainly, in my education. Because I would be using words that Americans just don't use. I would, instead of saying drug store, I would say chemist. Or I would try my best to remember to say bonnet instead of hood, or boot instead of trunk. But I often couldn't.

Joel Lovell

On the meal plan I ended up eating a lot of big piles of iceberg lettuce. And chickpeas.

Joel Lovell

Yeah, definitely. At first I would go really far from campus in order to have a BLT. There's this diner downtown in Ithaca, and it felt incredibly illicit. I'd be sitting there and I'd have some reading material or something with me, and I'd be the lonely guy in my booth. And I would order the BLT and I would watch it coming from across the room, with its toothpick in the top of it. And a side of French fries with this meat gravy on top. And when it landed on the table it would just seem like this incredibly wonderful moment. When you're doing something just totally unlike what anybody would expect of you.

Sean Cole

I was a nobody. I was living in an extremely small, kind of rural town, in the middle of nowhere. I guess, in a way, this was my way of travelling. And of being somebody. And sort of achieving an identity. Which I guess I didn't feel like I had. I didn't feel like-- I'm just sort of realizing this now-- but I guess I didn't feel as though I had anything that made me up.

Joel Lovell

I mean, what I realized fairly quickly is that if this is going to be believable, I actually have to believe in it. But I also began to, not only believe, but really sort of take on as my persona, all the stuff that I imagined was associated with vegetarianism.

Joel Lovell

Well, certain political convictions, and ways of dress.

Sean Cole

I wore ripped jeans and I wore combat boots. But I also wore a kind of stage jacket that you would see in a community theater production of Hamlet.

Joel Lovell

Yeah, I bought sandals. I very specifically remember going down to this thrift store in downtown Ithaca and buying a pair of fatigue shorts, which just seemed like I might as well have been Che Guevara at that point. As far I was concerned I was a dangerous leftist.

Sean Cole

Yeah, definitely. It wasn't pretty. And of course, I had grown up-- just to put this in context for a second, if you don't mind. I mean, not only had I had hundreds of hamburgers, and gone to the McDonald's drive through hundreds of times, but the counter point situation that I always think about when I remember this time was that, when I was a senior in high school, my family, for time saving reasons, decided that a great thing to do would be to go to Arby's Roast Beef. I don't know if you have those out in Chicago, I think they're countrywide.

So my dad and I would go to Arby's, on say, a Thursday afternoon or something. Or after I got out of school. And we would go in there and we would buy 48 Arby's roast beef sandwiches. And they would put them in this cardboard box. And we would bring home this giant box full of those tin foil covered Arby's roast beef sandwiches, and we would stuff them in our freezer. We would freeze the Arby's roast beef sandwiches and then we would have them there.

Joel Lovell

Buns and all, yeah. And so we would have them there as ready made snacks whenever we might want one. I mean, that's the kind of meat eating that my family was engaged in.

Sean Cole

The other things was that I had these run ins with doubting my British identity,

Sean Cole

Yeah, as though it were slipping away. And I would really go nuts at that point. And there was one time it happened at home. I was at home, and I was like, oh my god, I have to do something. I have to affirm my devotion. I opened up the window and I psyched myself to do it. I was just like, oh man, if I don't do this, it won't come back. And I opened up the window, and then I screamed-- this is in the middle of the night, or, ten at night. And I screamed I love England, of course in a British accent, outside the window.

Sean Cole

I felt like I had done something, at least.

Sean Cole

Yeah. I had fortified my Britishness.

Joel Lovell

I would find myself in these conversations where people were saying, you've never had a McDonald's hamburger. What kind of American, 18 year old American, has never had a hamburger from McDonald's?

Joel Lovell

Absolutely, absolutely. And I would say, yeah, you know. I've just never had one, they scare me. And I would talk about the ways-- and I would make up these stories about how I'd come close a couple of times. How a friend of mine in high school had bought me a Big Mac and there I was, sitting on the front seat of his car, and I almost ate it, and then couldn't bring myself to do it. So there was all the drama that I lied about.

My mom and Dad came down to visit for parents' weekend, and they were really proud that I was going there, and really excited to come down. And they came down to visit.

Joel Lovell

Right, exactly. Exactly. And so they drove down from Camillus, which is about between an hour and an hour and a half, they came down. And in that week leading up to parents' weekend, everybody's talking about their parents coming, and everybody's making reservations at restaurants, where to eat on Saturday night, and everybody's sort of planning on taking their parents to the football game on Saturday during the day. And it suddenly occurred to me, this real panic set it, that my parents would come down, and we would go to a football game and my dad would buy a hot dog. And somebody across the field would see Mr. Lovell eating a hot dog. And then, of course, the cat would be out of the bag.

And so I thought, I've got to make a reservation at a restaurant. At someplace either, A, where nobody else's parents will be, or at a vegetarian restaurant. And so what I did was make a reservation at the Moosewood Restaurant, which is in Ithaca. There's the Moosewood cookbooks that are out.

Joel Lovell

Exactly, yeah. And it's this nice little vegetarian restaurant in Ithaca, and a slightly famous place. But then we got there. And I remember sitting down at the table in the Moosewood, and the bowls are these kind of carved wooden bowls, and everything about it feels like a vegetarian restaurant.

Joel Lovell

Exactly. Exactly. And I was looking at my parents across the table, and they were dressed up and they were excited to be coming down, and I could tell my dad was sitting there and sort of perusing the menu and thinking, well, maybe this lentil salad will be good. Or whatever. And I could he was sitting there thinking geeze, I just drove an hour and a half, all I want is a steak, and a baked potato, and a beer. And there I was bringing them here.

But they were so game about it. They were so willing to go along with it because, for some reason, they thought I really wanted to bring them there. And I just thought, geeze, you know, these people, my parents, have really given up a lot for me to come there. I mean, financially they were really stretching themselves, and we were taking out all sorts of loans, and all of those things that people do in order to go to college. They never complained once about doing it. They just wanted to come down and see me there and feel all proud that I was there, and I was sort of hiding them out in this vegetarian restaurant. And I felt so bad about it afterwards.

And they never once complained. They went home, and I sort of imagine them stopping at a Hardy's just outside of Ithaca, getting a burger as soon as they say goodbye. But after that I just thought geeze, I've got to find some way to come clean about this.

Sean Cole

I think there's-- it's funny, I never thought I would say this-- but I think there's nothing wrong with that. I never thought I would say it because I wish that I hadn't done it now. But maybe I learned something from doing it. I mean, I think that that is par for the course. Now I think that's part of growing up.

Joel Lovell

I think it was probably necessary for me at that time in my life.

Joel Lovell

Yeah, and there was some ridge that that this allowed me to cross.

Sean Cole

Sean Cole works in public radio in Boston.

[MUSIC - "MEAT" BY NOISE ADDICT]

Dale Sekovich

David Diamond was a salesman at a boiler room.

Dale Sekovich

He was living in a very expensive home up in the hills of Woodland Hills. He drove a custom Porsche Carrera that he had shipped over here by airplane from Germany from the factory. They lived very high on the hog.

Dale Sekovich

The woman on the tape, I can't tell you her real name, but she uses the alias of Marge. She assumed the identity of a person who is named Marge. Marge was a real person who we in law enforcement and who people in the telemarketing business refer to as a mooch. A mooch is someone who will essentially buy anything from anybody who calls her on the telephone. In fact she did, over a number of years. She spent hundreds of thousands of dollars--

Dale Sekovich

The real Marge spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on bogus prize promotions, investments, gold coins, you name it. So the FBI went to Marge and said, we really think that we need to take your telephone number away from you, because it's being used to ruin your life. So once Marge agreed to that, her telephone number was installed in the home of an FBI volunteer. And that volunteer, every time that phone line rang, the Marge line, that volunteer would pick up that telephone, and answer it, and pose as Marge.

David Diamond

Marge?

Marge

Yes?

David Diamond

It's David Diamond, how are you?

Marge

Oh, I'm OK. It's kind of warm here.

David Diamond

Yeah. I set you up a video and a package.

Marge

Yes, I have it.

David Diamond

OK. The video is with regard to Mark Erickson. Mark Erickson is the person who is heading up the program. And he is very successful in taking upstart companies and making them successful. You've probably heard of Hard Copy. He's the original producer of Hard Copy.

Marge

I've heard of it, yes.

David Diamond

OK.

Dale Sekovich

Well I'm smiling because it's been a while since I've heard Marge, and she sounds so old, and so fragile, and such an easy mark, when in fact she's this sharp FBI informant. She doesn't look as old as she sounds, trust me. So that's one aspect of it. The other aspect is this whole Mark Erickson thing.

Dale Sekovich

Mark Erickson is a real person. He was named in our lawsuit.

Dale Sekovich

No. He was a segment producer and on the air reporter for Hard Copy for a brief period of time.

Dale Sekovich

Exactly. They want to make this something people can relate to.

David Diamond

Here's the thing. You have to invest everything you've got, or do nothing at all. And I'll say that again. You should invest everything you have. You should transfer all of your investments into this program or do nothing. It doesn't make sense to do just a little bit. You should think about doing a million dollars in this program.

Marge

Oh. I don't know. That's a lot of money.

David Diamond

You need to liquidate every nickel you've got. You either want to be in this situation, you either want to be in the situation wholeheartedly and upgrade your investments, or you don't. My suggestion to you is just do the whole thing.

Marge

Well, I would never liquidate everything I have.

David Diamond

My question is, why not?

Marge

Because there's always gambles in anything like this.

David Diamond

Anything like what?

Marge

Well, any investment like this.

David Diamond

Like this? What does that mean?

Marge

Well, anything you invest in, there's always a gamble.

David Diamond

No. Since we talked about this tape last, I actually had a revelation that came to me as to why. I listened to over 40 individual tapes of David Diamond. Of conversations with Marge and conversations with others over the course of about a year. And one of the things, when you've listen to all of them, you find that David, in the earlier part of that year, was much more sweet and cautious, and trying to bond with these women. And patient. And sometimes would spend an hour on the phone with them. The tape would be an hour long.

But this tape was made towards the very end of that year period. Probably within a week or two of our raid. Having gone in on the raid, and searched David Diamond's desk that day, I came to realize that David Diamond was starting to question whether he wanted to do this anymore. He was starting to really have some concerns about--

Dale Sekovich

Moral concerns about what they were doing. And I believe that in these last couple of weeks, and it's kind of shown in this tape, he was becoming a little bit desperate. He wanted to make a couple of more big hits, and he just couldn't figure out why this woman wasn't going to write him a check. So he started getting frustrated. And it comes out in his voice.

Dale Sekovich

David had become a born again. There were religious tracts all over his office, and posters on his wall.

Dale Sekovich

I don't know exactly what the time frame was. We do know that he had given a lot of the money that he had made to his church. And we believe that a lot of that was sort of a self-imposed penance, that he can justify what he was doing because he was giving his tithings. This money that he was taking from these poor victims into his church.

David Diamond

If $30,000 is what you made on every $5,000, and you put $50,000 into this program, that's $300,000 return. That's why I'm telling you, you need to do a million dollars in this program.

Marge

I don't know. I would never put that much in, in any program.

David Diamond

Do you have an obligation to yourself as an investor to make the most amount of money possible?

Marge

Well, you know, at my age it's really not that-- what do I want to say-- I have enough to live on for the rest of my life.

David Diamond

I understand. But is it still in your best interest to make the most amount of money possible if you can find to do it as safely as possible.

Marge

It's my obligation not to lose what I have.

David Diamond

Correct. But it's also your obligation to keep your money working for you, otherwise, what's the point.

Dale Sekovich

Every time I hear these pitches I'm outraged. Because I am the person that spoke to people who really did send David Diamond tens of thousands of dollars that consisted of their life savings and now don't have any money, even to buy groceries. I've interviewed them. I've seen them sob. Yeah, it makes me very angry.

Dale Sekovich

Slim and none. Slim and none.

David Diamond

We have public companies that want to take you public. So if you've got a public company that's passed judgement on it, it's not even me talking anymore. If Mark Erickson wants to do business with you it's not even me talking anymore. You have the ability to make an absolute fortune, and it doesn't make sense not to have every nickel you've got in this particular program. That's why I said it's an emergency investment situation and you should do at least fifty to a hundred, a hundred and fifty units while you have the opportunity.

Marge

Well, how much are you investing in this?

David Diamond

I'm not investing anything in this. My investment comes in the time that I put with my clients. Right. And the fact that when they make money, they reinvest with me.

Marge

Right.

David Diamond

That's the whole point.

Dale Sekovich

Of course, she's playing with him. Yeah. I mean, she's trained to ask him those kinds of questions so that he responds with a misrepresentation.

Dale Sekovich

Well, no. I think what we were trying to do, or her handler was trying to do, was get her to get him to say, oh yeah, I'm in it, and I've got my mother and my grandmother in it. And I'm putting away money for my child's education with it. Because then we could show later that he hadn't.

Dale Sekovich

I wish I could answer the question. I've never spoken to them. I'd love to get the answer to that myself. I'd like to ask that question myself. I think they get a lot of personal satisfaction though.

Dale Sekovich

Yeah, exactly. I do it too, I tape people using an alias in cases that I work.

Dale Sekovich

I love it. I love to get these people to tell me stuff. It's like acting. There's a rush.

Joe Gillis

See where they're standing? That's where we used to sleep.

Rebecca Allen

We would sleep all where those photos are.

Rebecca Allen

During the show we had to stay out there because they had to keep the marquee area clear.

Joe Gillis

So as soon as the show was over and they closed the doors, we'd all run over, and we all like, claim our spot because we'd all want to sleep under our favorite cast member.

Joe Gillis

I slept under Daphne once and I think I slept under Anthony another time.

Rebecca Allen

You're sleeping on the pavement while people walk by, ignoring you. And you're like, yeah, I'm just like those people in the play. You don't really think that.

Rebecca Allen

A small part of you thinks that. And will identify more with the play, the more you can be like it.

Catherine Skidmore

We met about two and a half, three years ago, when we were both interested in the musical Rent. We belonged to the same mailing list online. And she drove up to New York with some friends from college and they stayed in my apartment while they went to see the show.

Catherine Skidmore

I lived the closest to the theater out of anybody. And I think I was the only person in the line who had her own apartment, so I used to let friends stay with me when they drove up.

Catherine Skidmore

I think every weekend or every other weekend. It got turned into the hotel Catherine.

Catherine Skidmore

When she was in New York she used to come to the stage door and ask the actors to give her tours backstage, or ask them out for lunch or dinner. When she would email us Stephanie would say, I'm not feeling great. Could you ask the cast to send me a card, could you ask them to email me.

Anthony Rapp

I first got a letter that she kind of sent the same letter to several of us in the cast in New York.

Anthony Rapp

She was a young aspiring actress, student who was suffering from an illness, and that the show brought her great comfort. And she didn't know how long she had to live. You know, my heart went out to her, as all of our hearts did.

Gwen Stewart

You know, my heart just went out to her. It really did.

Gwen Stewart

And whenever she came to the show I would make sure that I would try to spend a little time with her. We'd gone out to dinner a couple times, and we'd sit around and talk, and I called her on the phone. I gave her my home number. And it was to the point where I literally made a point of praying for this girl each and every night.

Anthony Rapp

Well ultimately what we were hearing was that she was about to have this major surgery and that she was very scared about it. And that she came to New York right before she was going to have it. That was when Gwen Stewart and I went to lunch with her.

Gwen Stewart

She said that she was contemplating suicide. And I'm a spiritual person, and I'd gone as far as to look up all these scriptures to support life and to support hope and faith. And I would give them to her and tell her to read her Bible. And a lot of the conversations were like that. And then, you know, if it got a little too heavy, we'd swing it around to Rent.

Anthony Rapp

And at that lunch she brought out some medical paraphernalia. Like a syringe, and like an IV tube thing. She went off to the bathroom to supposedly administer herself some medication.

Anthony Rapp

She was getting to know them and befriending them and telling them her story and they held a prayer circle for her the night before her supposed surgery.

Anthony Rapp

Yeah, she was backstage and she was there with the cast and they held a prayer circle for her.

Jen Eldridge

Yeah, oh, where's my favorite one. Yeah, Monica emails are good.

Catherine Skidmore

Find the one about the coma. That's [INTERPOSING VOICES]

Jen Eldridge

The suicide one.

Catherine Skidmore

The suicide one's good, too. There's coma and suicide.

Catherine Skidmore

Here we go. This is an email from Monica on Friday, November 7, 1997, at 9:00 PM. Where she says, she sent this directly to me. I'm at Stephanie's, I just followed the EMTs out to the ambulance. Stephanie tried to end it all tonight. I found a syringe and an empty container of morphine. She didn't know that I was coming to check on her, blah, blah, blah, they say she'll be OK, and I caught her just in time. She really went all out, and I don't know how much of this she planned or how much--

Jen Eldridge

And keep in mind, this is a weekend she knew that all of her friends were converging in New York at Catherine's apartment. Like we were all going to be there together when this email came. And I think we were all in different levels of transit when you got this email and started just being very upset. And trying to get contact, and everybody's in cars and on trains trying to get there.

Catherine Skidmore

We tried to call the hospitals, and we tried to call 911 to see if they had a record of it. I called Kenny.

Catherine Skidmore

We could find her. No hospitals in her area had records of her being checked in. So we just said, oh my god, she's somewhere and we can't get to her, and we don't know what to do. And nobody knew what to do.

Catherine Skidmore

I don't know.

Catherine Skidmore

It was pretty miserable. Yeah, it was really miserable. We went, I guess we saw the show. Everybody bawled their way through it and cried their way through it. And went and told the cast members, of course, because that's what we thought she'd want us to do.

Josh Safran

So we were suspicious. We were talking more about it for a few days, but then she goes to the hospital, and she goes into a coma.

Josh Safran

I talked to Catherine, and Catherine was like, even though she doesn't want us to go there, even though Stephanie doesn't want any visitors, we're going to go. She's in a coma. We should be there. And I said good. And I said, tell Monica. And as soon as they told Monica, Stephanie woke up. As soon as that happened, Sean and Michelle and I were positive that we got her.

Josh Safran

She woke up so they didn't have to come. That was Monica, the way she phrased it in the email was, oh, she's better, you don't have to come. She'd like to see you in a few days. It was so obvious that she was pushing off. So we needed to find a way to make sure.

Josh Safran

It really became a crusade. I mean, there were three days where none of us slept. We only worked on this. And that was insane. It's embarrassing to think about it.

Josh Safran

We called information, and there was that number. She existed, she was there, we immediately were like, oh [BLEEP]. This was the moment of crisis where we were running around the apartment, freaking out, thinking we are terrible people. Because if we call this number, and this girl's like yes, Stephanie's in the hospital, but she's much better, then we were terrible, cynical people for-- like, it was everything that is wrong with the world and wrong with us. How could we ever think this. How could we spend so much time on it, how could we be such a horrible person.

So I called the number, and Monica answered. And I was so nervous. I remember it was in my dingy little kitchen with the plastic countertop, and I was so nervous that I was shaking the plastic countertop, and things were falling all over. And Monica was like, I've heard about you, but there's all this loud noise. So nervous. I said, how's Stephanie? And she said, she's doing better. And I was like, OK, thank you. And I hung up the phone because I didn't want-- I couldn't deal with it. But immediately Michelle, Sean, and I were like, she's doing better, she really is sick. But then we thought, but wait a minute, maybe not.

So they were like, you have to call back. And I'm like, I'm not going to call back. We just found out we're horrible people, she really is ill, blah, blah, blah. So they were like, but she didn't sound concerned, she didn't sound worried, call back. So we waited 10 minutes then I called back and I was like hi, I'm sorry Monica, it's Josh again. Look, when's the last time you saw Stephanie? She said, I saw her in class this morning. And that was it.

Catherine Skidmore

I had a list compiled of questions from our friends on why she did this, how sick was she, and she basically admitted that she did this as a cry for attention of sorts and it went overboard. And then once she started telling us all of these lies about what was going on she didn't have any way to back out of it. Then she kept going and she didn't feel like she could stop at any point during this.

Jen Eldridge

She would call me crying in the middle of the night that she was just ready to kill herself, couldn't deal with stuff. And I honestly think that when she called me and said these things, that it was genuine. It was just sort of something that went along with it and we would talk about it when she needed to and needed to be upset and cry. And there were many conversations about how she just didn't know how to deal with it anymore. And as I look back on it and I wonder if some of those I don't know how to deal with it conversations were really about she didn't know how to tell people that she had done this. I think there was a point for her when she realized that this was going to blow up in her face.

Anthony Rapp

It's very much about what people do in the face of all that. And in the case of the show, the group of friends really bands together. And so I don't know. I guess maybe on some level Stephanie thought that we would appreciate the plight of somebody who was young and facing something dire like that.

Anthony Rapp

Yeah.

Anthony Rapp

Yeah, sure.

Anthony Rapp

I know when I see a show that I love, I want to be in it. Seriously. It brought out the best in people. It did.

Catherine Skidmore

Afterwards, it was just pretty sick to read back and see it. That she really didn't care about her-- we thought we were her friends. She really cared more about the cast and their reaction.

Catherine Skidmore

Yeah, a eulogy.

Catherine Skidmore

Oh, absolutely. She had emailed us and said, when I go, when they put me in the ground, I want so and so to sing the reprise of "I'll Cover You" from the show at my grave. It would be great.

Gwen Stewart

When I first realized that it was all a lie, I was very angry.

Gwen Stewart

Very angry. And that's why I didn't speak to any of them. Because I had allowed a bunch of strangers to come into my life and I'd opened my heart to them.

Gwen Stewart

Not really. I mean, I didn't give out my number anymore. But I still signed autographs. I still took the time to talk to people, and took pictures, and all that other stuff. I didn't open myself anymore like I did. I felt betrayed. And I had to make sure that I didn't allow anybody else to do that.

Gwen Stewart

Oh, I did. I did. Because I realized that sickness and death were the least of her problems.

Rebecca Allen

It's not surprising to find out that something you think about someone in the line is a lie, or just like, a little off. Sasha, please, don't get me started. For example, this is my good friend Joe Gillis. But that is not his name. And how long did I know you before I knew that was not your name.

Joe Gillis

When did you figure out that was not my name?

Joe Gillis

My name is Joe Falduti.

Joe Gillis

I mean, I actively knew it was not real life. And I actually would say, my Rent friends and my real friends. But it's really weird how something that was so not real affected real life so much.

Rebecca Allen

That's what theater wants to do. They want you to become emotionally involved and care about something, and then leave it and go back to your real life.

Dale Sekovich

You know, I do it too. I tape people using an alias.