The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

by Griffin Dunne

I was playing a character who’d been killed by a werewolf and haunts his best friend David in three stages of decomposition. The six hours I spent in the makeup chair was for the first stage, which showed the aftermath of the werewolf’s attack. When Rick had painted the final touches of fresh blood to the gaping wounds slashed across my face, I studied my appearance in the mirror and felt something darker than the simple keys of sadness, more an overwhelming grief for someone I didn’t know. The violence of Rick’s handiwork was so real, it was as if I were watching my corpse laid out on a coroner’s table—details so exact that my severed jugular vein wiggled when I held my breath to keep from crying. It was my first starring role, and I should have been excited, but all I could think of was how horrified my mother would be to see me like this. I worried how the trauma of watching one of her children die such a horrible death would affect her health, and that I would be responsible for her imagining such unthinkable loss filled me with despair. Rick asked me what was wrong, but I didn’t have the words to possibly make him understand what I was feeling.