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By the book on Amazon
Category:
Humor
Publisher: lulu.com
ISBN-10: 1257832220
Type: Fiction
Pages: 126
Copyright: June, 30 2011
ISBN-13: 9781257832224
Price: $13.49 (eBook)
A madcap adventure in the world of theater, turned on its ear when pros from New York and Chicago drop into a community theater in the mountains.
“We have thirty days to write, rehearse, and stage a theatrical adaptation of the Odyssey, people have been promised a show that will blow their minds, and the budget is gratis.” With these words estranged friends from New York, Chicago, and San Francisco theaters descend on a small theater in Denver to try and save a kid’s after-school program. In a frantic haze they tear down most of performance space, rebuild it, bicker with locals and each other alike, fall in love, in lust, out of love, and ultimately the twenty and thirty-something’s have to answer the question of whether or not this is what they really want to still be doing now that they’re grown up, or if they’re grown up at all.
Excerpt
Mother Nature was raining down a storm to deluge the streets and make everybody think about staying inside and curling up with a bad movie or a good book, except Seth who wanted to stand out in it and soak up the full Technicolor experience. Rain drops felt good, even if the best he could do was crawl up on the roof of his apartment and sprawl out and enjoy the total peace and quiet, well, quiet aside from the rain and thunder that made it hard to hear his own thoughts. Not that he was thinking that hard, after pontificating on messing with Mother Nature he’d moved on to querying how many licks to finish a lollipop and generally where to find beef.
The phone had been ringing incessantly inside; he thought he might even have heard a knock at the door, more of a pounding really. There was no pressing need to get back downstairs, the only people that ever tried to get a hold of him were co-workers who thought of every task, break, and phone call as life and death for the world of finance, friends that were likewise convinced that their lives had the gravitas of legend, and people calling for favors. Seth was a soft touch, he knew he needed to thicken up his skin, a lot, but somehow that never stopped him from always agreeing to help out when people asked him, even when he couldn’t afford it, wasn’t sure what to do, or had to scrap his own plans to do so.
A new round of knocking was intense enough, not to mention incessant enough, to be too annoying to ignore, and Seth closed his eyes against the stinging rain, and he had a thing about closing his eyes. He fought a losing battle every night to stay awake so he wouldn’t have to. It wasn’t nightmares, it was just a predisposition to not waste otherwise useful time.
Opening the sliding glass door he took a deep breath and just trudged through the place dripping water on the carpet and ignoring the squishing puddles he was leaving behind. He told himself that he would clean up later, and he would, it just might take a week or two to get around to it. As Seth opened the door he saw his sometime friend Alan all doe-eyed underneath an umbrella, Alan’s eyes took in Seth soaked through and the trail of sopping carpet that led out to the balcony and he sighed, “Good, I was starting to think you were swimming with the fishes.” As if on cue a roll of thunder broke, and Seth could almost hear the cackle of a mad scientist in an old Hammer Horror film.
“Having a Gene Kelly moment?” Alan asked as he shouldered his way in.
“Just enjoying a free bath, there was no singing involved,” Seth mumbled, suddenly aware that he was freezing, his arms and legs stung they were so cold, and his hands were shaking so badly he could barely close the door. He leaned against the wall and hugged himself, fighting the urge to just collapse to the floor.
“I think I need some ah… What do you call it when people need ah… Favor,” Alan was fidgeting on the couch, which wasn’t like him. Alan Trujillo was, for lack of a better phrase, an elegant man. His father had parlayed a modest success as a door to door salesman into a magnificent bull market windfall. He’d raised his son to fit in with his boyhood picture of a well-bred gentleman, the end result being a poised, articulate, man with a taste for the finer things in life and a bizarre self-centered nature in his conversations with other people.
“You need a favor, some help, something I can do for you, and here I was thinking that maybe you just missed me.”
“I’m a dead man walking,” Alan was quivering nearly as much as Seth, but he was bone dry, and he’d never been one to be afraid of hyperbole and melodramatics.
“Walking, talking, and making a scene, you’re strangely intrusive for a corpse; somehow I always thought the dead would be more considerate.” Seth was trying to pick his way through the clutter back to the bedroom to change clothes, but his legs stung with cold so severely that he could hardly take a step. “I’m tired, did it ever occur to you that you might be interrupting beddy-bye time?”
“Not really,” It had stopped surprising Seth how egocentric Alan was a long time before this. Alan was standing up now, pacing the living room and looking everywhere except at Seth. “You have to help, they’re coming out to see the show.”
“Alan, I’m afraid I need a little more than that to even pretend to care.”
“I needed money, but there were no takers so I told them it was for a play, a revolutionary play, and then all kinds of people wanted to get their names attached to it. I fed them dates and artwork, and I really thought I was going to get away with it, I built a theater you know. Then they called today saying they’d booked a flight and couldn’t wait to see opening night.” Alan stopped pacing and glanced down, realizing that he was standing in the left-overs of a pizza.
As Seth hurriedly changed into his warmest clothes layer by layer, even putting on his gloves and a sock-hat, he grumbled half to himself and half just loud enough to be heard, “So you swindled some people out of their money and spun them a story, congratulations you’ve earned your tonic salesman merit badge. Now you want help getting out of the lie instead of coping to stealing.”
“It was the Rec Center Seth, I was trying to do a good thing, but no one wanted to invest in something like that. There were plenty of other tax write-offs in the world, and a lot of them gave better press. Banks didn’t want to touch it even with the collateral that I was offering.” The center was Alan’s bid for immortality, the Trujillo Rec Center was his dream for the disenfranchised youth of the world. In Alan’s mind the driving force behind gangs, drugs, crime, drop-outs, teen pregnancy, and a host of social ills was their lack of classical education. Seth had heard dumber theories, but mostly from people with tinfoil on their heads.
“Then these Chicago types got in touch,” Alan went on like he was about to cry.
As Seth cranked the heat up and lit the over he almost felt some sympathy for the man. “Like the mob? Cause that would actually be kind of neat.”
“Investors, maybe mob, maybe Wall Street, who can tell them apart these days? They misunderstood, and thought I was pitching a show to make the classics cool again. They were the first people to actually show interest so I went with it. Next thing I know I’m…”
“Buried up to your neck in the sand and spinning more lies to cover your first lies thinking ‘why can’t I drink enough antacid’. Do you hear a laugh track in your head, Lucy and Ethel couldn’t have got in this deep.” Seth was trying to ignore Alan’s dry sobs and using the oven like a fireplace to warm his hands. “Sounds like it’s time to own up and give the money back.”
“I can’t, it’s spent. We broke ground six months ago, I even convinced the contractor to hire on some kids out on parole for the crew. You know, give them a real second chance. The center has a theater that’s ready to go, I just need a show to put in it.”
“No.”
“It’s what you used to do right? You were a playwright or something like that when you lived out east?”
“No.”
“It would mean a lot to me.”
“No.”
“These kids are finally getting another chance in life.”
“No.”
“What’s the harm in doing one more show?”
“Keep looking for another Ethel, Lucy.” Seth jumped up onto the stovetop to dangle his feet in front of the oven, wiggling his toes and offering Alan a row of teeth. “Whole comedy and drama thing, that’s not my scene these days, there’s a thousand wanna-be's and think-they-are’s in this city, get one of them to do it, or, hey, better yet just tell the truth.”
“Seth, I’m saying please,” Alan just went limp and fell back in the left-over Chinese in the arm chair, he was crying and whining, and not even trying to fight it. “I walk away and it’s just another broken promise to these kids, that’s not just all they get, that’s all they expect. I lied, I cheated, I stole, and I can admit that between us, but if I admit it publicly I’m not the only one who has to pay the price.”
“Impressive, that is first class self-justification, we put that together with selling snake-oil and you’re turning into one amazing white collar con artist.” Seth shook his head, he didn’t want to, but he was pretty sure he was going to end up bending over backwards to make this happen. “I should have taken a left turn at Albuquerque,” Seth glanced around for a carrot just cause, “or Jamestown, or Poughkeepsie, or Kansas City, you know where the left and right went tweedledee and tweedledum isn’t really the point.” It was time for Seth to quit stalling. “How much time do you have?”
“I don’t know, shouldn’t it only take about a month?”
His fists clenched white knuckled Seth stomped back out into the downpour, he looked straight up into the rain and let it cascade over him. He felt every icy drop, and they hit him like a thousand knife cuts right through his heavy clothes. As he ducked back in, leaning against the sliding glass door and staring at Alan who was pretty much petrified by fear, he asked “How soon did you promise them a curtain?”
“Thirty days.”
Seth fell to his knees, it wasn’t just laughing that was cracking his ribs, it was more writhing with hysterics, the absurdity of the whole night caught up to him instantly. “And I’ll bet the budget is gratis? Somehow I’m just willing to bet dimes to nickels that you don’t have a penny.”
The lack of an answer told him everything that he needed to know. Heading into the bedroom, a wave of exhaustion so complete hit him and he nearly tumbled onto the bed. Bracing himself he snatched up his phone and dialed a number he had thought he would never call again, he’d managed to avoid it for nearly four years now.
As he waited and wondered whether she would answer or not he looked at Alan, still standing like a deer in headlights, and not even a buck, he still had more of a doe thing happening. ‘If she does answer, she’s going to kill me, actually, probably she’ll just castrate me.’ At this point it was very important that he stop thinking about what was about to happen.
“Do you have any idea what time it is?” the groggy voice on the other end of the line said.
“Katie? Hey, what are you working on these days?”
“I was sleeping! If you’re drunk could you just call an ex-girlfriend?” There was a tired sigh, a cat’s growl, and then, “Why couldn’t you just join the circus and be living the gypsy life like a normal person?”
“I know it’s been awhile but I thought you might be at least a little happy to hear from me.” Seth turned his back on Alan for a moment, there had been a lot of reasons why he’d walked away from his old life, but they weren’t really the kind of things you talked about when people were in earshot. “I need a favor.” There were also a few reasons why he missed his old life, like being the one to say that instead of being the one to drop everything to do that.
“You lost the right to ask me for favors a long time ago.”
“It’s a show, curtain in thirty days, no money, and if it doesn’t come off then a bunch of at risk kids lose their after school fee-free clubhouse. I don’t care if you’re doing it for me, for the kids, because you’re bored, because of the alignment of Mars, or because you’re afraid Tinkerbelle might not make it, but I can’t do this without you.” Seth closed his eyes, the moment they were shut he could picture the look on Katie’s half asleep face, and that was the first time through the entire freezing night that he got goose bumps.
“A show in thirty days? No wonder you called me, you’re delusional, you can’t even write a show in thirty days.”
“We’ll make it something boy-meets-girl in the park simple then.” Seth was leaning against the glass balcony doors and shooting a look over at Alan, the man’s face had just gone very pale indeed.
“I guess if it’s quick and dirty enough,” Katie wavered and Seth might have been excited if he hadn’t been watching Alan chewing his tongue trying to work up the nerve to speak.
“I told them the show was the Odyssey.” Alan hoarsely gasped the words and then got very interested in the oven.
“Check that Katie, we’re doing the Odyssey. You know, like the proverbial ‘they’ say, go big, go crazy big, or crawl your dumb ass back home.”
Katie snarled through the phone, “You are the dumbest, most thick-headed, moron I have ever known, and this is stupid even for you.”
“I see nothing in that statement to argue with.” Seth had to fight hard to bite back a childish self-deprecating giggle.
“Where the hell are you these days?” Katie asked despite her determination to stay furious.
“Still in Denver, enjoying the weather, and generally doing my level best to stay out of deviant trouble.”
“You say that like I should have known you were in Denver in the first place. As if perhaps you hadn’t just packed up and left New York, not a word to anybody, no phone calls, no e-mails, just a guy that we used to know. No, no, you don’t have any right to ask me for anything.”
“Halloween, five years ago,” Seth couldn’t quite keep himself from smiling as he said it.
“… I’ll be there in the morning.”
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