Bastille
Day, July 14th, 2002Bastille
Day, July 14th, 2002
Have
you thought of visiting the prison?
1.
A QUIET
MOMENT
2.
SQUARE
ONE Happy Bastille Day, Remember to
Free the Marquis!
PETER:
We are living today in a world where Chanel Products are made in Ohio.
“Liaisons, what happened to them.
Indiscriminate women, it pains me more than I can say, the lack of taste
that they display. Where is style?
Where is skill? Where is forethought?”
TYR:
We have with us tonight descendents of French Royalty, and also strangers
to the French Side, but first, A French Count and Baron, hence the name, Marc
Baron. His lineage, on his
mother’s side includes a Confidant to Cardinal Richelieu, known in some
inquisitive corners as the Grey Eminence.
LISA:
As for his father’s side, there was a General Under Napoleon,
considered Napoleon’s second. He eventually became Governor of Elva Island, where Napoleon,
according to Anthony Burgess’s novel, Napoleon Symphony, was forced to drink
milk. This did irreparable damage
to Napoleon’s digestive tract. Thank
you, Anthony Burgess. The
Frenchman’s name? General Antoine
Drouot (Drew-oh).
PETER:
Taking us back to those days, Before the Revolution, here he is, Marc
Baron.
WHEN
THE WORLD WAS YOUNG, Johnny Mercer
PETER:
In reaction to the Grey Eminence and his ilk, there was Bastille Day, the
fun-house mirror version of the United States’s American Revolution, which
freed the colonies from British Rule.
LISA:
The walls of the Bastille prison were 10 feet thick and 90 feet high.
Not only were they a symbol of tyrannical monarchy, but for the people of
Paris, they were a source of ammunition. The
Bastille was a spare shed for dry storage, misused and abused like the
Parthenon, which was destroyed by an ammunitions explosion.
TYR:
When the people of Paris stormed the Bastille prison, on July 14, 1789,
they freed only seven prisoners, and the Marquis De Sade was not among them.
After five years of imprisonment at the Bastille, The Marquis was
transferred to the Charedon Asylum for the insane.
PETER:
Thus did the Marquis miss by a mere ten days his chance to be lionized as
a political prisoner, and thus do we miss our chance to free him.
LISA:
However, we can free him in our thoughts.
He can strengthen our goals with his fatalistic perspective.
Or we can ignore that he ever lived, as we ignore the lives of so many
sentient beings out there. This is
your chance to introduce yourselves to the people next to you.
PETER:
Here is a song for the jailed Marquis De Sade to sing to the ladybugs,
while awaiting his never arriving rescuers.
(In
performance, Jeneen Terrana sang “Out of My Mind”)
4.
HAPP’LY WAIT
What
is really out there? Singing what
the Marquis would sing if he were actually free from the manacles to follow his
footsteps through the windy side streets of Le Sacre Cour, here is Judith
Caporali, lover of France’s fine wine, its sensuous language, its passionate
people, distinguished by their short tempers and stupefying self absorption.
5.
PARIS IS A LONELY TOWN (Harburg/Arlen from “Gay Purree”)
Some
people don’t like the French attitude. The
French never thanked us for saving them from Facism.
They insist on speaking French to us.
To paraphrase David Sedaris, “Exactly how annoying were you when they
insulted you?”
6.
THE BEST (Kalt/Dizozza)
------------------
OUR
INNER WORLD
YOU’RE
WITH A WONDERFUL GIRL
The
Burning of the Bastille and I want to be there. TROPICAL DEPRESSION
CUL DE SAC
HELL
HOLE
-------------------
Rousseau
and De Sade together paved the way for
The
Age of Romantic Enlightenment
NEW -- 2005 Show
RESUME Liberty, Equality and Fraternity...For the past 9 years I've done a Bastille Day show, usually with an announcement, now nearly 216 years late, to remember to free the Marquis (DeSade), a free thinking writer who spent his prison days assembling incendiary wordplay, first at the Bastille, but by July 14th, 1789, make no mistake, he had already been transferred to the Claredon Asylum. In fact, the Bastille, that symbol of the absolute and arbitrary power of an ancient regime, held only seven prisoners at the time. Anyway, rather than rewrite a heads rolling spoof of America's revolt from Britain, I'm going to make up a new story based loosely upon a review I read of a new John Irving novel. So, welcome the age of Romantic Enlightenment. It's BASTILLE DAY 2005. Send the kids to boarding school and let's go on the road! GATED HOUSE AND GARDEN My set is loosely based on the Michiko Kakatani New York Times July 12th review of John Irving's new novel, "Until I Find You." Who are the victims in my story? Me for one. What are my most uncomfortable parts? My stormcloud thunder flatulence? My masturbatory fantasy of ravishing someone stronger than me. What's going to hurt the most? My gradual loss of consciousness from a blow to the back of the head (Someone please give me a craniotomy!)? No, betrayal hurts the most and sex with meaning contains components to support betrayal of the most appalling kind. A boy without a father molested by a woman. I ask you to care, with difficulty, for the passive curiously vacant boy that results. Find the father, Telemachus. A sentimental education. A sexual education. A scholastic education - of the passive curiously vacant boy. Find the father, Telemachus, and claim your soul. Be lost no more. There's a cross-dressing component in our lives and in the new John Irving novel. If I cared enough about clothing I would consider cross-dressing. Like Mao, I like gender-neutral clothing. Masculine/Feminine. A pretty woman is pretty all the time. Make eye contact. I can't even look at you. When people speak at me. Talkin' at me. Look at me! Wait. I must first put up my shield. Now shall I stare back at you.
Mathematicians explicate the power/sex/money equation. Three parts power, one part sex, no part money.
Detached from success, because of its unreality. Yet other people see it. They observe. I see my success whether they do or not, and I'm detached from it, in my own private subway car.
BELIEVE IT SO. Don't let it worry you. You walk on light steps.
Smut or Schumudtzt. Who buys hagan das stickbars? I do! I've been feeling so irritable lately that I was offended when a person in the grocery store cut the line to use a food stamp card to buy a hagan das bar. I was one of the people on line at the corner grocery store, who saw the line cut by a slender person of indeterminate sex, wearing my favorite gender-neutral shirt and pants, and of indiscriminate age, holding a hagan das stick bar box and a food stamp card. After a few moments of card sliding and keyboard tapping there was a cashless transfer of Two Dollars and Seventy-Five cents. My half dozen bananas cost a dollar eight-seven.
I love walking along the docks, looking in on all the yachts, functioning as houseboats in the boat basin. To enhance that experience, from peer to peer I appear to peer into the pier of my peers. Here's what I saw. Don't be sad, papa. Your heavenly brides-groom is here. Don't be fearful of feedback father. There's someone awful outside peering into our window from the back porch. Have we no curtains? Yes, we have no curtains. Have we no walls? Yes, we have no walls. Let your eyelids be your curtains. Your body is wall enough.
Miss Cartridge followed the two lovers, one of whom is our hero, that passive curiously vacant boy about whom we find it difficult to care, Telemechus, the other a more arbitrarily bizarre Emma, who finds painful any form of intercourse involving movement, and it was to them that Miss Cartridge sold a clock before made off with their forty dollars. "It was made by the prisoners of East Port, under maximum security." SQUARE ONE SET THE PRISONERS FREE To make the sale, she spent a long night with the lone lovers acting chaperone to their one nightstand. They only had one nightstand in that hotel room and they needed two, as they were both wading knee deep in John Irving's new 800 page book, Until I find You.
One night began a beautiful friendship. Having only the one nightstand, the lovers noticed how they made themselves ugly in each other's eyes? If you invoke the inability to be aroused by all but the exceedingly perverse, then first gain permission; don't invoke the normal world. The world peers in, directing our attention toward it, not toward us at all.
Across the street a new hotel has hundreds of rooms, its floors are not slanted and it is less expensive. We're paying too much for cheap rustic rooms that are quaint. In our happiness we have only one-way to go from peer to peer, from there to here.
How many more days of being minimally productive can we bear? Keep producing to live.
Someone else is here with us. Miss Cartridge chaperoned the one-night stand of Telemachus and Emma. Then she sold the couple a clock made by prison inmates. Deny the mysticism and steal back your friend. To the hotel attic bedroom/slanted room/family room, relatives arrive in the morning.
But that night prior, in the bar… Hello, you two. Do either of you know me? I don't know about her. She and I have only just met each other. Emma, is it? And I'm Telemechus, looking for my fathering all the wrong places. How do you do? I'm Miss Cartridge, your self-appointed chaperone for the night. We're just leaving. Do you mind if I accompany you on your journey into the night air? Why? As you two embark on a risky merge I want to make sure everything goes well. You're selling something. No. I need a place to stay. I'll crash wherever you go. It's a room on the top floor of an old hotel. The ceiling is slanted. The floor's slanted. I expect my relatives to arrive there first thing in the morning. Is that where you're taking me back? Yes. I should have told you. Do you have someplace else to go? My building doesn't allow men past ten. His place is where we want to go. I suppose so. DON'T LEAVE ME BEHIND The room grows quiet.
Do you feel like the inserting of yourself into her there is what you'll do? Do you mind? I'm on my side of the bed. Too bad it's a twin. (3 in a twin) (She's holding them.) I like the feel of the whole thing. I'm sleeping. We're making love in your proximity. We're walls apart. But we're not. Your body is wall enough. Draw the curtains over your eyes. By the nightstand, a one-night stand achieves stranger intimacy. Ah. Good morning, you two. Before I go, can I interest you in a plain white-faced kitchen clock? How much? Forty dollars. It's made in East Bridge. That's where the prison is. I like the face on that clock. I'll take it. Here's your forty dollars. LIVING IN FREEDOM AGAIN She ripped us off. I don't think so. Do we know each other now? I think so. Next stop, East Bridge, to set the prisoners free.
CLOCK FACE The indefatigability of goodness I rise to the ceiling then drop hard. Husband and wife rise with me. Hell Nothing hell Death hell nothing hell. JACK's DREAM - in which he finds his father, CLOCKFACE, everywhere. Flying up to the ceiling of the telephone building museum height then to the bathroom. Looking in the mirror I see my own fantasy. Panic awakening. Ornate. Not private. What mistakes hung in my crazy-hair death-mask. Phony delivery after visit to the top floor. Freefalling elevator. Expose gun. Shooting holes in the floor to slow it down. A globe. Consider the mathematics of orbs and balls. Hello, CLOCK FACE, 360 degrees, or 12 hours, or 720 minutes, that's 70 degrees, 2 minutes, 40 seconds latitude, 30 degrees, 10 minutes, 29 seconds longitude. We need latitude and longitude for the great globe. We need an altitude and azimuth for locating a sphere in the topocentric coordinate system. Don't forget the azimuth, due north, 0 degrees. Midnight. 12 is 0. 1 is 30.
Turns out Telemechus was guilty for reasons other than those charged. He broke the laws of nature! LOVE THE LAW