Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [7]
And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!
Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.
They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.
They leaped like deer on the moon.
The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it.
It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling.
They kissed it.
And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.
It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.
Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.
It was then that the Bergerons’ television tube burned out.
Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.
George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. "You been crying?" he said to Hazel.
"Yup," she said.
"What about?" he said.
"I forget," she said. "Something real sad on television."
"What was it?" he said.
"It’s all kind of mixed up in my mind," said Hazel.
"Forget sad things," said George.
"I always do," said Hazel.
"That’s my girl," said George. He winced. There was the sound of a rivetting gun in his head.
"Gee—I could tell that one was a doozy," said Hazel.
"You can say that again," said George.
"Gee—" said Hazel, "I could tell that one was a doozy."
(1961)
WHO AM I THIS TIME?
THE NORTH CRAWFORD Mask and Wig Club, an amateur theatrical society I belong to, voted to do Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire for the spring play. Doris Sawyer, who always directs, said she couldn’t direct this time because her mother was so sick. And she said the club ought to develop some other directors anyway, because she couldn’t live forever, even though she’d made it safely to seventy-four.
So I got stuck with the directing job, even though the only thing I’d ever directed before was the installation of combination aluminum storm windows and screens I’d sold. That’s what I am, a salesman of storm windows and doors, and here and there a bathtub enclosure. As far as acting goes, the highest rank I ever held on stage was either butler or policeman, whichever’s higher.
I made a lot of conditions before I took the directing job, and the biggest one was that Harry Nash, the only real actor the club has, had to take the Marlon Brando part in the play. To give you an idea of how versatile Harry is, inside of one year he was Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, then Abe Lincoln in Abe Lincoln in Illinois and then the young architect in The Moon Is Blue. The year after that, Harry Nash was Henry the Eighth in Anne of the Thousand Days and Doc in Come Back Little Sheba, and I was after him for Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. Harry wasn’t at the meeting to say whether he’d take the part or not. He never came to meetings. He was too shy. He didn’t stay away from meetings because he had something else to do. He wasn’t married, didn’t go out with women—didn’t have any close men friends either. He stayed away from all kinds of gatherings because he never could think of anything to say or do without a script.
So I had to go down to Miller’s Hardware Store, where Harry was a clerk, the next day and ask him if he’d take the part. I stopped off at the telephone company to complain about a bill I’d gotten for a call to Honolulu, I’d never called Honolulu in my life.
And there was this beautiful girl I’d never seen before behind the counter at the phone company, and she explained that the company had put in an automatic billing machine and that the machine didn’t have all the bugs out of it yet. It made