The summer that I was 21 and home from college, I went to see the musical comedy She Loves Me at our local community theater. I went with my parents. I was completely unattached, having only been on a handful of awkward dates in my life. My folks liked comedies and I loved theater. I had acted in and painted sets for many shows at this converted barn-playhouse since I was in high school.

You might know She Loves Me even if you don’t recognize its title. It was first a straight play, and then the basis for the 1940 movie The Shop Around the Corner with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan; the musical stage show was written in the ‘60s, and it was even recycled a few years ago for the movie You’ve Got Mail. The original story was about a young man and woman who met working in a gift shop in Budapest in the 1930s and instantly disliked each other; but they each had a penpal to whom they wrote, not really knowing his and her correspondent’s true identity. The charming twist of course was that they were unwittingly writing to, and becoming very fond of, each other in the course of their letters. But they continued to snipe and snap at each other at work until they came to realize they were really in love.

The show was delightful, full of disarming characters, sweet songs and a plot — like most musical comedies — that could never happen in real life. I remember the shopgirl jumping up on her bed, clasping a letter to her chest, and singing about her romantic secret love, as well as the plodding old shop clerk who warbled philosophically about the huge universe and how he was just one little speck in it. A high school friend of mine played the delivery boy who rode a bicycle helter-skelter onto the stage when you’d least expect it – this was a theater-in-the-round, so the people sitting on the aisles jumped every time he sped up the ramps, ch-ch-chinging his bike bell. There’s a slapdash scene in a restaurant, with a scatterbrained headwaiter trying to maintain a ‘r-r-r-r-romantic’ atmosphere: he trilled his R’s as he crashed from table to table, knocking over vases and almost spilling wine on all the patrons. And there’s the charming moment at the end when the young clerk — who has figured out this shopgirl has been his love all along — reads a ‘secret’ penpal letter to her out loud and she realizes she has been so silly and blind not to see the love right in front of her nose.