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Story Notes:
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Jim looked around at the sodden stretch of grass in front of him and wondered again why he was here. It had seemed, inexplicably, like a good idea at the time to agree to come to his new boss’s play. It was Shakespeare in the Park; he vaguely remembered liking Shakespeare in the Park when he was younger, and it was free, always an important consideration when he’d only begun to be able to do adult things like pay bills a few months ago when he’d started at Dunder Mifflin, the least exciting but most available job he could find. But he should have known that since it was Michael who was involved, there would be some way it would all go wrong.

                               

OK, that wasn’t entirely Michael’s fault, he had to admit. A large part of things going wrong was entirely the fault of one James Duncan Halpert, or at least his hormones. Or whatever part of him it was (it felt like all of him) that reacted to the office receptionist, one Pam Beesly. Because the real reason he was here wasn’t that he liked Shakespeare in the Park, though he did, or that he didn’t want to spend money on entertainment, though he didn’t, or even that Michael had asked him to, though he had. It was that he’d overheard Pam telling her fiancé, Roy, that she was going, and he’d heard Roy saying he wasn’t, and the sheer possibility of spending some time with Pam outside of work without Roy had been irresistible.

 

So when he’d shown up to the park—not in the rain, but clearly and distinctly immediately after the rain, as the spreading stain on his jeans proved—and seen Roy sitting grumpily next to Pam, his mood had worsened. And when Roy had spent the entire performance grumbling loudly about the quality of the production, loudly enough that Jim (who had found a spot under a tree from which he could see  both performance and Pam, but studiously avoided sitting too close to her lest the urge to punch Roy become overwhelming) had had to hear ever word, his day had only gotten more unpleasant. It had briefly improved when he’d realized Michael was actually doing pretty well in the show—it was always nice to know you could genuinely compliment Michael, because he got so excited when you said anything nice about his passions—but then come down again when he’d let himself pay attention to the main plot.

 

Because really, what had he expected when he went to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream? He should have done himself a favor and reread the thing before making the idiotic decision to come. A play about lovers who are planning to marry the wrong people? A play about righting those wrong pairings? A play where love conquers all? It was like William Shakespeare was reaching out from the grave and pointing a finger at him, Jim Halpert, and laughing.

 

It helped a little that it was a guy, Demetrius, who didn’t know his own mind, not a girl—but it helped not at all that the woman playing Hermia, who was being fought over by Demetrius and her actual beloved, Lysander, looked an awful lot like Pam. If you were obsessed with Pam and inclined to see her everywhere, as Jim was. Her name was Katy Moore, and according to the program she had some kind of job selling purses when she wasn’t doing community theater. Demetrius, according to the same source, was Steve Kim, and when Jim wasn’t feeling sorry for himself he had to admit the guy was doing a bang-up job. The way he turned on a dime from expressing hatred and anger towards Helena (a willowy blonde who definitely didn’t remember all her lines, and whom Jim didn’t even bother to look up in the program) to fawning over the same woman was impressive, if depressing. And the sheer joy with which he got into the physical elements of the role, running around the “forest” in search of first Hermia and then Helena, was infectious.

 

He was almost having as much fun as Michael.

 

The play ended, and the actors took their bows—Michael got the star bow at the end mostly, Jim suspected, because he’d probably made the director’s life hell until he did, but it wasn’t entirely undeserved—and Jim waved vaguely at Pam as Roy pulled her away to their pickup. He was suddenly alone on the wet grass except for the actors, the rest of the audience (which had seemed to be about 40% Dunder Mifflin employees there because Michael had offered them a late start on Monday if they came to his show over the weekend) having also departed for whatever better entertainment they had in store for themselves. But his roommate Mark was out of town this weekend, so Jim had little else to do, and almost by default he found himself walking forward towards the actors who were still putting away their minimal set and looked like they could use a hand or two.

 

“Hey, Michael,” he greeted his boss as he took the other end of the bench Michael was ineffectually trying to heft up into the back of someone’s pickup. “Nice work today.”

 

“Jimbo!” Michael let go of the bench to give Jim a hug, and while he appreciated the gesture he would have appreciated more not having the entire weight of the surprisingly heavy wooden seat suddenly sag into his arms. “Did you like it?”

 

Jim would have said he did, if he had been given a minute to respond. But he was not.

 

“Wasn’t I awesome? I mean, when they asked me to do this part, I was like, really, Bottom? I’m not a bottom, I’m a power top. Or at least that’s what Todd Packer said, and he’s my best bud, so it’s like I said it, only better because I didn’t have to make Jeffrey mad. No one likes it when Jeffrey’s mad. It’s like, hello, all that testosterone can’t be good for your heart, am I right? Have you met him yet? Not Jeffrey, he’s right here, hello Jeffrey, this is Jimbo, he works for me back at the ole DM, but we don’t like to say he’s my employee, more like my brother from another mother, right Jimmy Jim Jams? Where was I? Todd Packer. Have you met TP yet? Well, I suppose you meet TP every time you go to the bathroom, am I right? The good old BM of DM. I told Todd that one one time, for some reason he didn’t seem to like it. But I suppose he’s been on the road ever since you started, so you probably haven’t met him. Anyway Todd told me I shouldn’t take the part, something about how being a bottom was unmanly, but I thought to myself, hey, they always say you should do things top to bottom, so that has to mean Bottom is the top, right? And anyway, by the time I talked to Todd I’d already taken the part. Ralph here said it was just typecasting, because Bottom wears the ass’s ears and I’m already an ass, but I told him, you know what Ralph means in England? It means shut up. And then he did. Which is good, because I needed to concentrate on my big speech. Did you like it? The one about Bottom’s dream? I crushed it didn’t I? Thanks, Jim, you always know what to say.”

 

Jim might have actually said something if he’d been able to follow all of that, which he might have done if he hadn’t been concentrating the entire time on not letting the bench fall on his foot, or on Michael. Fortunately, Michael didn’t seem to really require a response. Even more fortunately, he finally felt the weight lift as another person took some of the load. Glancing up he saw that it was Demetrius, or Steve Kim.

 

“Thanks.” Together they slung the bench up into the bed of the truck.

 

“Thank you.” Steve held out a hand, and Jim shook it. “I’m Steve, and I know why I’m hauling stuff, but I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”

 

“Jim. In case you missed it, I work with Michael.”

 

“Ah.” Steve gave Jim a sympathetic look.

 

“Exactly.”

 

“Well, thanks for the hand.” Apparently this was Steve’s truck, because he started for the driver’s side door. “And thanks for coming out—I know Michael’s been saying his whole office would come out for him, but we didn’t really know what to expect.”

 

“You’re welcome. You were really good, by the way.”

 

“Oh…thanks.” Steve grinned, then winced as Michael slung an arm over his shoulder and hugged him just a little too tight.

 

“So, Steve, I see you have met the honorable Jim,” Michael said in an Asian accent so bad Jim went past wincing and into some kind of catatonic shock. He and Steve exchanged a look that told Jim in an instant that they were going to be friends. He found himself accepting Michael’s suggestion that he come out with “his Shakes-peers” to Poor Richard’s for a drink, if only to shield Steve as best he could from any more casual racism.

 

By the end of the evening he and Steve had established that they were practically neighbors, and both played basketball down at the Y, if usually about an hour apart. A few weeks later, Mark got up late and he and Jim ended up in Steve’s pickup game, and from that point on they were fast friends.

 

It was years before they mentioned Michael to each other ever again.


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