Losing friends

I guess when you're young, the idea of losing a friend isn't quite as painful. Or maybe it is. Loss is always a shock to the system.

Today I found out that someone I admired and got to know while taking a class with him, passed away a few weeks ago. We weren't close, but I knew he was there. Now there's another hole in my universe where this friendly, enthusiastic, full of interesting experiences and stories man used to be. And I'm saddened. He survived one bout of cancer to fall to a second one.

Mike Laurence had a long career in the movie industry. He worked on films I knew and loved as well as those of which I had seldom heard. He walked into a classroom with a class that had been dumped in his lap only days earlier and made it work. We learned and he learned. By the end of the first 12 weeks we could set up a C stand, knew what a baby was and could level a camera on a stand. We could light a set and move a dolly so that the camera onboard wasn't jerking. Some of us filmed with a Country Name for a Christmas special, one left for a real job in the industry.

The second half of the class, instead of sending us out to work on small projects, on commercials and videos and things like that, we took in the talent we had, wrote a script and then scored a real, name director to help us shoot the 50 minute movie about a local boy who didn't quite make good, in spite of one heck of an idea. We spent four weeks shooting the movie, we sweated, we learned and the finished product was one we were all proud to see our name in lights on.

Mike was our guiding light and our friend. He was liason between "above the line" and "below the line" and made things work when we didn't know exactly what we were doing or how to do it.

Now he's gone, and the world is a little dimmer for his passing. We'll miss you. And you'd better have places for us when we get there .....