JoAnn Mangione

JoAnn and I grew up not too far from each other on Long Island — me in Levittown, her in East Meadow — but we never knew each other there. We met in Lakewood, OH, in the early '90s, when I was living in the upstairs half of a double on Athens and she was moving to town from Syracuse to work at Channel 3 TV. She looked at an apartment in the double next door to mine, didn't rent it, but became friendly with the house's owner, Julie — who lived upstairs and was thus my next-door neighbor. Julie eventually moved away and dropped out of sight, but JoAnn and I have been friends ever since. (We never dated, but people who saw us together often assumed that we were a couple — and, when they found out that we weren't, often wondered why we weren't. Eeeeeeuw, we'd say. We definitely spent a lot of time commiserating with each other about our messed-up love lives, though....)

After a couple of years at Channel 3, Jo left television and took a job as public relations manager at the Cleveland Play House, America's first professional theater. (I got to see a lot of really excellent theater as her guest — thanks, Jo!) She introduced me to her old friends Susan and Bill when they moved to Cleveland, and the four of us have spent a ton of very enjoyable time together.

Meanwhile, JoJo has always had a hankerin' to live in the Washington, DC, area, and in 2001 she packed up and moved there. She found a job doing PR for a think tank called the Constitution Project, got a pretty little apartment in Old Town, Alexandria, VA, made some nice new friends. The CP unfortunately suffered some budget cutbacks and had to let her go, but she ultimately got a PR job in Bethesda, bought her first home, and fulfilled another lifelong dream by beginning to take acting classes.

The top photo was taken in downtown DC in 2002. The dog is Fala, and the site is the FDR Memorial.

The two little ones at the left, also from 2002, are of my then-girlfriend Michelle and Jo in Alexandria eating S'moreos at Cosi and of Becca and JoJo at my place in Strongsville, OH, when Jo was in town for Thanksgiving.

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