mld, July 28, 2002 at 2:56:00 AM CEST

French Burlesque

Slogging through my referrer logs, I see a hit from an AOL search.

The search term?

"stories of unbearable itching" Heh.

If you're wondering, that hits a skit I wrote for an event at TRF, titled As The Worm Turns.

The story was inspired by, and in the fashion of, Moliere's "The Imaginary Invalid"

I don't know if it's that funny to read, but as performed, it was sidesplitting. :-)

I'd like to point you to a link to the original play, but oddly enough, it seems there is not a script online, at least in translation. (It was written in French) Somebody with a few hours of time on their hands, and access to a library, could make a welcome contribution to the the sum total of human knowledge on the internet.

 

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mld, June 6, 2002 at 5:13:00 AM CEST

Pyramids, Epitaphs, and Apologies In Amber

"If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing."

Benjamin Franklin

Most blogs are of just a limited few types. (The 80/20 rule always applies)

In no particular order...

The Slice of Life:

Pictures of my cat, what I'm reading, how my date went last night, an online diary. Ordinarily interesting only if you're interested in the person for some reason other than the blog, unless the material is presented in such a way as to make the presentation itself interesting. The most common type of blog.

The Newshound:

Up to the minute commentary on politics, tech trends, often heavily linked and syndicated in an incestuous manner to other newshound bloggers. Ephemeral content, with a life span of a few weeks, after which it smells like last week's fish. Anybody wanna read some commentary on MonicaGate? Howza 'bout Halle Berry at Oscars? I didn't think so.

Cathartic Blogs:

Blogging as therapy, an evocation of the questions, doubts and miseries of our personal lives, hopefully with the process leading toward self-discovery of some of the Final Answers.

Hot Buttons:

Blogs about some special interest topic - sci-fi movies, conspiracy theories, weight-loss programs, linux apps, or breeding exotic pets. Narrowly focused.

Literary:

The author's prose and poetry, and/or discussions of literary genres, favorite authors, and works.

Few are 100% pristine examples of one single type. Most are primarily of one of those types, with a few odd posts of other flavors mixed in.

Of all those types, it seems that the most common is the Slice of Life, often combined with the Cathartic blog.

Why is this so? Why do we write what we do, and why has the keeping of a personal journal online become the huge phenomenon that it has of late?

I cannot speak for all, but as for me...

What I like best is just telling stories. Some of them are even true. :-)

While most of the stuff you're reading here is completely true, some of it is completely made up, and some of it is an amalgam of fact and imagination, with the proportions depending on my mood, and estimation of what makes a better story.

I'm not going to let the facts get in the way of a good story. Some stories are too good not to be true, and create their own reality.

In some of his later novels, Robert Heinlein wrote of a theory concerning the author as a creative force in the universe; that as stories were written, universes were created in which that story was "real."

This is not as outlandish as it may seem at the first glance.

Which person is more "real," any of the nameless billions that have gone to their graves, unheralded, unremembered, as lost to us today as if they had in fact never existed, or, say, Captain Ahab, Romeo, or Odysseus?

In one sense, an anonymous 11th century peasant is more real, as we can be sure that she did in fact share in the same sort of fleshly existence we now do. We most certainly wish to believe that we are real, do we not?

But we can know no more than that about her, or any of those lost ones. We are forced to, like an author of fiction, to imagine the details of her life; her plot and her character, even her very name, are as much a creative work as any of Homer's. (Or perhaps even more so, as we can reasonably surmise that there was a Helen and a Paris and the whole rest of that crew)

As your imagination of her will be different from mine, or the next person's, and so on, her "reality" is not fixed, but amorphous. She becomes no more than a tabula rasa for our imagination.

So in what way is her existence real? She has no way of now influencing us; she is as irretrievably barred from affecting today's news as if she were on the other side of the event horizon of a black hole. (I know Hawking now claims that some stuff does in fact escape, but allow me my metaphor, OK? Thanks.)

Meanwhile, we are moved to weep for Romeo, rejoice with Odysseus as he triumphs over his foes and reclaims his home, and marvel at Ahab's iron will. Their stories, their characters, and those of the thousands of other people that never "lived," save in the life of the mind, first of their creator, then in his readers, continue to move and instruct us, shaping our way of thinking, and thus our way of life.

One of my favorite passages in all of literature is from Ahab as he challenges the gods, and mocks them in their inability to influence him, because as a man, he possesses free will... "Swerve me? Ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! Man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run." The first time I read that, as a teen, I was still too young to fully appreciate all the layers of meaning in those lines and the complete passage in which they are found, but even then it inspired me to live my life in accordance with my will, not that of a god I had already ceased to believe existed, or a culture that, given free rein, would be happy to dictate my life's path.

Some will argue that it is in actuality Melville, and not Ahab, that continues to have real power to move us today. That seems reasonable.

But if we are to argue that a creation, be it Ahab, or you, or me, has no independent intrinsic existence, but is just an artifact, a secondhand manifestation of the creator, where, in fact, does that leave us? For if that is true, then we ourselves have no more reality than Ahab does, for we must be the product of some creative force, whichever label your personal beliefs may want to pin upon it, so once again, Ahab's "realness" is as valid as our own.

This leads us to an uneasy conclusion. For our lives, our reality, to continue after we have shuffled off this mortal coil, we must somehow have the ability for our existence to have mattered, or, at the very least, to have it be remembered.

This is the force that motivates wealthy men to donate millions of dollars to charitable foundations, with their name attached to it, that caused ancient kings and causes modern men to erect great civic monuments with their names and deeds engraved upon them, and why, on a much smaller scale, we put names on the headstones of our graves. So that we will not become one of Orwell's "unpersons," erased from history, our lives washed away by the passage of time.

To return at last, like Odysseus after decades of wandering, to our subject, I think that is why we write our blogs, and why, more than anything else, we fill them with the details of our lives.

It's been said that once something has been put on the internet, it is impossible to remove. This is true. Were I to completely erase this this blog, it would till be around in search engine caches, on the backup tapes of the web servers, and, since you're reading this, on your machine, too.

There is every reason to believe that it will be around as long as our species is alive and kicking. Given that we finally get up off our lazy duffs and colonize space, so that when Ellie comes around to give the planet a mortal conk on the noggin, she misses some of us, that could very well prove to be, for all practical purposes, eternity.

This is an entirely new thing in the human experience; the average Joe now has a chance to commit his thoughts and his life to paper, err,,, electrons, and have a reasonable assurance that they will be around for many generations to come. Even my wolfhounds and Shelby will have the chance to have a durable conmmeration that will far outlast the pyramids of even the mightiest Pharoh. (That is, when I finally get their entries done :-)

We are the mayflies of the universe. As long as life may seem to us in a subjective sense, we are here and gone again in less than a blink on a galactic timescale. We know this in our hearts, and there is in humans some primordial need to shout "Hey, look at me! Remember me! I was here once! This is what I was like!" out into the eternal void, and hope that someone eons down the road will hear our faint voices.

I confess it to be one of my primary motivations. I don't expect I'll be making millions of dollars to endow an university or charitable trust. These entries, and maybe a few pictures will most likely be all that remain of me a century from now.

I don't think that's the prime reason, though. There is another that spurs me each day to write.

As my life has turned out, I have a daughter that does not live with me, and has not for years. It is unlikely that we will ever even live in the same state before she is an adult.

I sometimes think of this site as an extended letter to her, something for her to read after she is grown, an explanation, perhaps even an apology, for the way the twists and turns of life have taken us away from each other, and a way for her to come to know me in a way that few of us ever get to know our parents.

I had so many dreams about my fatherhood, of being there to help with her homework, to teach, to make her laugh, to play games, to help her through those tough adolescent years, to sing with her and watch over her at night.

The reality is different. I watch her life as through a telescope, from afar, and our time together is telescoped into a few days each year around holidays and such, and weekly talks on the phone that do more to drive home the vastness of the gulf that divides us than they do to bridge it.

Perhaps someday this can be that bridge, and I can become more real to her, so that she will not have to resort, as we do in contemplating that long dead and forgotten peasant woman, to clothing the bare bones of my life with the fanciful flesh of her dreams.

 

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mld, June 4, 2002 at 3:09:00 AM CEST

As The Worm Turns

Every year, at TRF, as the season draws to an end, the performers throw a party. The name has changed over the years. It used to be called "Bad Culture Night." After several of the skits went a bit overboard, it was necessary to tweak the event a bit, and change the name. It's now known as "Naked Jester."

The various players all perform skits and songs, virtually all of them bawdy, satirizing the events and people of that year's festival.

Two years ago, though I'm not strictly a cast member, (in that I don't get paid by the faire) I wrote this skit for the event.

I only steal from the best. The style of the skit was lifted straight from Moliere, the greatest French comedic satirist and playwright. It contains some inside jokes that won't make sense unless you know the faire and the cst quite well, but in that, it resembles Shakespeare and Aristophanes. Most all good satire contains references to contemporaneous events and personages that don't age well.

Dramatis Personae

Hippocratus D'Orafus - The Royal Physician

Nurse Bonocorpo - D'Orafus' Assistant

Lord Wigglesworth - Courtier/Fop

Guardsmen to Wigglesworth (2)

Rex - D'Orafus' Labrador Retreiver

Puss 'n Boots - D'Orafus' Pussy Cat

Barbarians (2) Aides to D'Orafus

The Worm

Prologue

(Spoken by D'Orafus)

Aah, there you are, my lovely Queen? We present to you these bawdy scenes. T'is in honor of your Silver Masque, We have taken up this task. We too, must slay a dire beast. An evil one who's name is legion, from a dank and noisome region. We therefore hope to earn a Queenly bus... Presenting "As The Worm Turns," by Yours Truly, Hippocratus T. D'Orafus

Scene I

The Physician's Office. In it is a large examination table, a desk, and several chairs. On the desk is a large black doctors bag. D'Orafus sets at his desk.

Enter Nurse Bonocorpo, a very sexy Italian nurse

Bon: Bonjourno, Dottore.

Dr. D: And how are your humours this day, BonoCorpo?

Bon: Perhaps the good doctor should see for himself... hmm?

(The Dr. reaches under B.'s skirt, feel around a bit. The nurse reacts appropriately.)

Dr: Both the warm, and moist humours most advantageously mixed, dear nurse. I predict a MOST pleasurable day. But first, to work. How stands the patient roster?

Dr: (aside to audience) The women all call me Doctor, 'cause I make 'em feel so good!

Bon: (likewise to the audience) The men all just CALL me, honey.

Bon: Lord Wigglesworth is in, complaining of an unusual ailment.

Dr: Oh, WIGGLESWORTH? (Shimmies) This should be interesting. Do bring him in.

(Releases her with a final squeeze)

(Enter Wigglesworth, a foppish, nelly, nobleman, in a veritable eruption of distress, almost in tears...)

Wig: Dear Doctor D'Orafus, you simply MUST help me! I am completely on my last nerve, I don't know what else to do!

Dr: There, there, good man. Tell me your problem.

Wig: For the last few weeks, though I eat and eat and eat, like a very PIG, I am forever famished! I am losing weight, LOOK at me, all this beauty simply melting away... (bawling)... And the worse thing is, I have this UNBEARABLE itching in my nether regions...

(As if to emphasize it, he begins to scratch his ass QUITE deeply)

Dr: UmmHmmm... well, first, we must perform an examination... Nurse!

(D'Orafus and Bonocorpo proceed to quickly perform a cursory examination of the patient, in the process stripping him of all his valuables, rings, jewelry, pouch, etc. They work smoothly and as a team, evidently well-practiced. Bonocorpo is quite useful at using peeks of her charms to distract Wigglesworth...)

Dr: I begin to see your problem, dear Lord, but we must be thorough... Nurse - bring out the Endoscope!

Bon: The Endoscope!

Wig: The "Endoscope???"

(D'Orafus rolls Wigglesworth over, facedown on the exam table, as Bonocorpo goes to the bag and removes the Endoscope. It is a helmet with a long phallus projecting from the forehead, with a large glass eye on the business end. Two half-coconuts are attached in front of the helmet over the eyes, giving the overall appearance of two testicles hanging below the phallic projection.)

Wig: Oh, my!!

(D'Orafus dons the mask. It is clear that he is totally blind with it on. Bonocorpo further positions Wigglesworth on the table, pulls down his tights and spreads his legs. She then leads D'Orafus and directs the end of the endoscope to Wigglesworths' ass, who squeals appropriately)

Dr: Now, nurse, turn it on.

(Bonocorpus begins to stroke and lick the Endoscope)

Dr: No, the light, woman!

(she flicks it on...)

Dr: I see, ummm, interesting... 'tis difficult to tell with all the obstructions here...

(D'Orafus reaches down and removes, in no particular order, a used condom, a dead rat, and a small twig doll that looks like one of the Blair Witch dolls, save that this one has on the hat of a court lady, name to be detirmined later)

Dr: Ah, I can now see the problem...

(Removes the Endoscope, and tosses it down...)

Dr: I am sorry to tell you this, but you have a tapeworm, my good man.

Wig: A tapeworm? A TAPEWORM! Impossible! That is such a low-class ailment! A PEASANT problem! I demand a second opinion!

Dr: Nurse?

Bon: It's a tapeworm, indeed. (Nodding)

Dr: See?

Wig: I demand a further opinion!

Dr: (sighs) Very well. Nurse, call Puss 'N Boots and The Royal Retriever.

Bon: Puss 'N Boots! Rex!

(Enter Puss 'N Boots, a slinky sexy, feline,and the Royal Retriver, a big, happy doofus of a dog. D'Orafus points to Wigglesworth, who is now standing. PNB slinks over and and begins to sniff and lick all over the patient. After a time, she works his way over to his ass. Then with a sharp reaction, perhaps a sneeze and a few spits, she ends the exam. PNB walks over to D'Orafus, entwines herself around him, and meows in his ear...)

PNB: Wooorrm! Wooorrmm!

(D'Orafus reaches into his pouch, and hands PNB a treat, which she licks off his fingers, then exits...)

Wig: Bah! What does a mere pussy know of things medical!

Dr: Rex!

(He grabs the dog, who has been sniffing and trying to dry-hump Bonocorpo, and points him to Wigglesworth. In a similar, but much more sloppy, doggy, manner, he examines Wigglesworth, then gallumphs over to Bonocorpo.)

Ret: Woorrmfff! Woorrmfff! (trying again to hump her leg)

Dr: There you see.

Wig: (crestfallen) Oh, dear me, what can I do?

Dr: Fear not, I do know just the remedy for your malady. Many of the nobles have been afflicted recently.

Wig: (brightens) Really?

Dr: Yes, indeed. It seems that many of those dining at the Feast Hall of late have been afflicted. It would seem that in their haste to serve, some of the pork dishes were too rarely cooked. My good Lord, you have been porked by the pork!

Wig: Well, the cure, doctor, the cure!

Dr: Tis quite simple. Each day, for the next seven days, after each meal, three times a day, take a hardboiled egg, and then a chocolate chip cookie, and put them up your ass.

Wig: WHAAT!

Dr: You did hear me correctly. One hard-boiled egg, one chocolate chip cookie. Up the ass. Then return to my office for the rest of the cure.

Wig: Oh dear me. But Doctor's orders, I do guess. (Turns to leave.)

Dr: Oh, my Lord (reaches into his bag to produce a bill) There is the matter of my charges. 400 pounds, to be exact.

Wig: 400 Pounds! For an office visit! Prepostorous!

Dr: Quite reasonable, actually. The office visist was in fact, free, but it 'twas 200 for the Cat Scan, and 200 for the Lab Test!

Wig: (takes the bill, grumbles and exit)

Prologue to Scene II

(Spoken by Nurse Bonocorpo, with Wigglesworth making various sounds of pain & agony offstage...)

Seven days go crawling past, Pity the patient's tender ass! Twenty one orbs the hen has laid, Twenty one treats the baker made, One by one, Into his bum, A cramming they did go...

Wig: (in the background) OOOH!

Scene II

(Again, at the Doctors office, seven days later. D'Orafus and Bonocorpo are sitting on his desk, enjoying one another's attentions. In bursts Wigglesworth, accompanied by two Gaurdsmen. He is obviously in a rage..., and is walking QUITE gingerly, and scratches constantly)

Wig: Doctor D'Orafus! I have faithfully, PAINFULLY, followed your prescription, and have only gotten worse! I continue to waste away, I am ravenous with hunger, and my poor arse is on fire, though it is packed with more eggs than a henhouse! I will have you arrested for malpractice!

(The Guardsmen seize the doctor)

Bon: Oh boys! (snaps her fingers)

(Enter the Barbarians. In addition to their barbarian finery, they wear small white nurses caps. They each walk up to a Guardsman, and emit a fierce growl. The cowering guards quickly release the doctor, and make a hurried exit.)

Dr: Please, please, relax, good Lord. As I did say, your cure is at hand.

(He reaches into his bag, pulling out an enormous leek, and a hard-boiled egg the size of an ostrich egg.)

Dr: Prepare the patient.

(The Barbarians, and Bonocorpo sieze Wigglesworth, and restrain him, facedown and again spread-eagled on the examination table. Bonocorpo pulls down his tights.)

Wig: Oh Dear God, NOOOO!

(D'Orafus shoves the egg up Wigglesworth)

Dr: Steady, boys!

(What follows is the climactic moment of the skit. After a few moments, something strange begins to happen to the patient. A look comes over his face. He groans. Then, with ever-increasing frequency, his limbs begin to shake, his hips buck up and down, and waves of shimmies convulse his body. Then finally, he emits a might burst of flatulence - which is the cue for the worm, who pops his head out, looks quickly about in all directions, turns to D'Orafus, and says...)

The Worm: Hey, where's my COOKIE? (The worm has the Face, Beard, and Hat of King Henry, and the Voice of Cartman from South Park)

(Both Barbarians swing their clubs and miss, but D'Orafus manages to stun the worm with his leek, and grab the Worm about the neck. What ensues is a 15-20 second tug of war between the Worm and the Doctor, with the other players assisting. The Worm curses, screams, and mocks them all at once, as the others yell back at each other)

All of the following lines are uttered in one mighty Brawl:

The Worm: I want my cookie, and I want it nyow! Fuck you, leave me alone, it's a good gig I've got here! OWWW!!!, you're killing me! This sucks ass! Don't you know who I am? Get away from hyeah! You were late! You'll never get me! I am the mighty King!

Dr: Oh, NO! Tis the Royal Worm, the mightiest parasite in the body politic. Tis never before been dislodged in the history of the state. Woe is us!

(The Barbarians and Bonocorpo generally scream and grunt and growl, as their character befits)

(Finally, the Worm makes a last desperate pull back, pulling the Doctor's arm all the way back into Wigglesworth up to the shoulder, his face hitting him in the ass. The effect on Wigglesworth is, to say the least, electric. )

Dr: Help me, boys!

(As Bonocorpo holds Wigglesworth down, near the head of the exam table, the barbarians physically lift the Doctor, and begin to pull - after one last mighty tug, accompanied by sreams form both Wigglesworth and the Worm, they manage to pull the entire 10 foot length of the worm, and with repeated blows of club and ax, kill it. D'Orafus brandishes it in triumph)

Dr: Victory! The Evil worm is dead! Long live the King!

THE END

Epilogue

(Spoken by The Doctor)

And now our lowly skit is done, The beast is slain, the battle won. The mighty beast has been defeated, The parasite has been... unseated. If our skit did cause A laugh or smile Do but applaud A little while. And did you like it NOT, Here's what to do,

(Entire Company)

LINE UP! WE'VE GOT AN EGG FOR YOU!

 

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