N.B.: This post was made simultaneously here and at Upside-down Hippopotamus. We are everywhere.
For Thanksgiving, my dog A. and I went to the middle of nowhere in western Maryland with this man, his dog Goblin, his boyfriend Rob, and his boyfriend's sister Rindy. Rob and Rindy did virtually all the cooking, with two exceptions, and were also obsessive-compulsive enough to do all the cleaning up before David and I could get to it. On Thanksgiving Day, however, they exacted a price. "We'll cook Thanksgiving dinner," they said, "but you two and the dogs have to put on a Thanksgiving play."
We presented the play in the form of a puppet show, in which the dogs were the puppets and we manipulated them as we crouched behind the couch that was our stage (after covering it with green blankets to represent the fertile bounty of an unsullied new land); we spoke the dogs' lines in eerie, Talky-Tina-from-the-Twilight-Zone-like falsettos. A. and Goblin made their stage débuts to great acclaim, and David's and my performance as puppeteers was such as to make me think we have bright futures ahead of us as high-ranking members of the Republican cabinet.
Here are two photographs of the stars, in different attitudes.
The girls look off artistically into the middle distance.
The girls express their true feelings for each other.
And so here, without further ado, is a reconstruction of the script we developed. (Unfortunately, we didn't write it down, but we agree that this is fairly close, with one notable exception.)
A Thanksgiving Play in Three Scenes
starring A. and Goblin
Scene 1
A.: Hello. Iím an indigenous person.
GOBLIN: And Iím a pilgrim.
A.: Letís have Thanksgiving.
GOBLIN: Okay.
A.: Great. Hereís some maize.
GOBLIN: Thanks. Hereís some firewater and some smallpox-infested blankets*.
A.: Thanks.
(SHE begins to die, loudly.)
Argh! Iím dying from the smallpox-infested blankets! Argh!
(SHE dies.)
Scene 2
A.: Hello. Iím an indigenous person.
GOBLIN: And Iím a fat, greedy, rich American capitalist.
A.: You killed my people with your smallpox-infested blankets and then took all our land and then forced us all to run casinos. We want our land back!
GOBLIN: No. And now Iím going to win lots of money in your casino.
A.: Argh!
Scene 3
A.: Hello. Iím an indigenous person.
GOBLIN: And Iím still a fat, greedy, rich American capitalist.
A.: With all the money I made from the casinos you forced me to run, Iíve become a billionaire and taken over the world and also developed superpowers!
GOBLIN: No!
A.: Now Iím going to kill you!
GOBLIN: Argh!
(SHE dies.)
A.: I win!
GOBLIN: And Iím a ghost.
THE END
With material like this, how can I fail to become a star?
*David insists that this line was actually "I bring you firewater and smallpox-infested blankets," but I believe my own version.
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