My parents raised me to never feel inferior to anyone: the foreign publisher, the local administrator tasked with running some cultural event, the candidate for the Nobel Prize. If you’re calm and humble and give people space, you’ll feel comfortable anywhere. My parents never explicitly told me any of this, but there was something in the combination of my father’s secular, sober confidence (he’s an angel investor for young entrepreneurs) and my mother’s deep Catholic faith: there’s no one my parents feel inferior to because there’s no one they feel superior to.

This kind of upbringing is useful when it comes to women: here I was in this intimate circle, and I felt comfortable talking to the bike girl, without knowing her name or even feeling the urge to look for it on the poster hanging by the ticket counter. I told her: “Maybe someone should write the parents’ side of things…”

And she looked at me for the first time, her expression friendly, and said: “No, no—you’ve got it wrong. This is a comedy, and the mother and father are archetypes. Besides, you know—it’s more based on my family than hers.”

“My clients aren’t the least convinced,” I said while the others laughed, “it’s more like a personal attack—and it warrants some kind of explanation.”

And our little performance played out just as naturally as I’d hoped it would, with the two of us now continuing this conversation on our own, away from the others, as the parents said their goodbyes: “Yeah, that was something—her poor parents,” she said. “But they deserved it, you know, they’re pretty bad. Still, they’re sweet. I kind of feel sorry for them.”

The other two girls joined us, and then the four of us went out to the closest bar to buy the playwright a Campari; she wasn’t laughing now; she kept thinking about her parents, saying, “Can you believe how they reacted?” to the other two.

The playwright insisted on buying for everyone and headed to the cash register, and I took advantage of the moment when the third actress went out for a cigarette to lean closer to this girl, whose name, I’d found out, was Barbara: “Let’s go have dinner on our own,” I said.

I stepped back, and she pursed her lips and looked away, smiling as she took her phone from her white patent-leather purse and typed in her code.

I wandered down the bar to give her some privacy—it was one of those long, narrow places that can make things awkward—and then the four of us went outside, split up, and as I headed to my moped, and, without any fuss or self-consciousness, Barbara came along, too.