Joe, a fellow actor and my current scene partner and I are in my apartment, as of 5;30 pm today, rehearsing Act 3 scene 1 of ‘All My Sons’ by Arthur Miller. There are lines in the script where Joe, as husband to my Kate, yells at me. In the script, I call him on the act of yelling at me. Joe and I run it and run it, with different emotions, takes, feelings, but consistently he has a place or two where he raises his voice at me. [In our building we have an illegal Airbnb in apartment #1 and as we go through these paces I wondered if anyone is hearing this, as Joe’s voice carries and I hear doors closing. In a hotel you might report it to the front desk. Here there is no one ‘in charge’] We finish up at 6:45 and just before he leaves, I offer to make a photocopy of some information for him. While waiting for the copy, I check my phone, which has neither rung with a call nor buzzed with a message. I see a message from my upstairs neighbor – of whom I have written before, posted at 6:34 -it reads ” Max, let me know, at any hour, if you ever need help at home.” Immediately i realize that he was hearing us through the floor and he thought I was being abused. I write him back – “Hi James, we are rehearing All My Sons and I wondered if any of the neighbors heard. You are so thoughtful!”, but realize that is not enough of an answer. I show the message to Joe as he leaves and say, I must go upstairs and make contact so James knows that I am really acting and not in trouble. James next text says” Oh well I guess that counts as an affirming if layman scoring of “Well Done on the acting.” Joe leaves and I run up the stairs. James upon seeing me at the door accepts my invite to come down and have a glass and for the next 2.5 hours we chat. To put the event behind us, I show him it is a script, and confirm that there is a performance date. He confides that he came down the stairs and stood outside my door listening. Not knowing it was a script, he said he was just waiting to see if it escalated to another level and if it had, he was going to bang on the door, call 911 and then break in. He also said that the ‘cryptic message’ was because he didn’t know but that the ‘person in my apartment might read it.” My choice had been to be whispering and so he said he didn’t hear my voice except for the line : You stop that”, which I say when the husband threatens to shoot himself. How deeply touched and reassured I was that a neighbor with whom I have such minimal contact would go out of his way to secure my safely. {I am now curious as to his history to be so attentive to such an event}. And they say you have no human-ness in a big City. What reassurance. For our next rehearsal, I’ll hang a sign on my door. [James is an airline pilot and often away, so he didn’t know what I ‘do’ here in the City.]