Temerity Theatre

Antnee knew it was a good idea. The more stars he saw through his telescope, the more popcorn he would need to make for his diorama. He had been popping off all day. Life was like butter. Stars shaped by force. After winter break, he would bring his diorama in to the Science Fair and people would see all the constellations in the sky. At the same time. Which, Antnee knew, you can’t do from one point on Earth. I mean, not to be a nerd, he thought, but when you’re in the Northern Hemisphere you see the stars in the Northern Hemisphere. How’re you gonna see the Southern Hemisphere unless you go to Auckland, which sounds like awkward, which is what I am, he thought. You’ll never see all the stars all at once. You’re probably not going to be able to bend over, suck your own dick, and shove your head up your ass, either. But, if you walk by my Science Fair project, you will see it all. More than everything! Most people are born, or are birthed if you want to make it sound more active, and then they hold all of their laughter inside. The laughter, he thought, turns into rage, which turns into smiles. Smiles are definitely not the same thing as mirth. And if you don’t know that, well, what else are you missing out on that you don’t know, either? Neptune was there and no one knew it. They argued about it because they saw a wobble in one of the moons of one of the other planets. So they looked in their telescopes again and there it was, in 1846. This might set a precedent. Are you having a bad day, he wanted to ask the girls in his class? Maybe there’s a moon following you around. Actually, Antnee thought he would make a sign next to his diorama. This is as good as it has ever been, it would say. If you want things to get better, kiss me under the popcorn night sky. Antnee enjoyed these thoughts. But, you know, I am looking through this telescope using human eyes. Why don’t I add in all the stars I don’t even see? And it was a good idea. And he would need much more popcorn.

It was a very inclusive orgy.  I didn’t expect to go to jail for it, though.  That’s why I’m in seclusion right now.

The world is a many splendored, inclusive thing.  Like the clitoris.  The more nerve endings included, the better.  No one was excluded.  At least that was not our intention.

So, back to the orgy.  Part of the reason it became controversial was because we broke into the Pentagon.  But it wasn’t for anything bad.

I mean, picture the world as a perfect sphere.  Can’t you do that?  Thank you.  I know I’m demanding, but it’s just my repressed programming saying that.

The world is a sphere.  The clitoris is an upside down wishbone.  These are good shapes.  They represent union.  The Pentagon is none of these things.  Its purpose is exclusion.  We can’t have that.  The only thing you can do with a pentagon, other than ignore it, is take a bunch of them and make a soccer ball covered in groups of this shape.  That would mean interpenetration and mutual respect.  This is not the lesson we get from our Pentagon.  Did you know it is located in Virginia and has twice as many bathrooms because of racial segregation?

I spent so many years living in delusion.  What kind of delusion?  The delusion of separation.  Like right brain and left brain stuff.  There were spaces between me and the things that I said.  I was not open to new ideas because everything was closed.  So, one day at yoga, that’s when the prajna hit the road.  Once the thought crashed into this dimension, it had to be shared.

So many naked people, so few security clearances.  We were let in from the inside, by a sexually liberated civil servant.  The system rebelled against itself.  But still, it was kind of top secret.  Because I had always wanted to be a top.  Is that so wrong?

Now, I ask you, should a world power like the U.S.A., which uses other countries like toys, get upset about me using sex toys inside the Department of Defense?  It sounds very defensive of them, doesn’t it?  When they led me away, I was handcuffed but not clothed.  They might as well have put barbed wire around my pudenda.  Isn’t what they do when they find something they can’t control, like the Rio Grande, put up walls and barbed wire?

So, I am awaiting trial but folks are kind of busy at the moment putting the real criminals on trial.  So I will stay secluded from the world but not from myself.  I will be ready for the next orgy when I get out.

The bureau of military intelligence was busy interrogating people.

The officers kept track of the forced confessions using a large number of hidden recording devices.

Unfortunately, a lot of bad things had happened which the Supreme Leader didn’t want to take responsibility for, so there had been a need to arrest a larger than average number of folks who could confess.

With so much to record, the batteries ran out midway through the torture, brutality and data gathering.

This was not discovered until the next day.  Who would tell the Supreme Leader?

Would it be an option to all get together and see if the officers could remember what the prisoners had said?  Maybe they could write even better versions.  They stayed up all night, and managed to pull it off.  Well, it was like looking at plastic surgery, you could tell something had been done.
Conclusion: the more you learn, the less you know

“Turn Over a New Year”

Part 1 – Dude’s Diary

I wish we were allowed to leave this space station.

Don’t get me wrong.  I like breathing air.

But maybe a nice planet we could go to.

Or a moon.  A moon would be dope.

I know I’ve got it good up here, less gravity, so much easier to get around.

But I ask myself, how would it be to stand in a place with real gravity?

It would be fuckin’ hard.  Don’t bullshit me.

I might walk a few steps.  Then maybe I would collapse on the ground, gasping, grateful to be alive.  Getting used to gravity again would make me wish for somewhere to swim.  Somewhere I could take it easy while working it all out.

Space is not the place.  Don’t tell anyone I said that.  It’s not allowed.

The Central Bureau insists we must live in space, for several reasons.

Space is the great equalizer.  No one has any mobility issues in space.
OK, like, I can get down with that.

Also, there is room for everyone in space.

I mean yeah, duh, there fucking better be.

Also, everyone alive has equal access to living quarters in space.  Space has alleviated the housing shortage.

Because they all fucking blow, every single place to live up here.  I wish you could tell the Party that.  It’s no party, talking to the Party.

Also, there is enough food for everyone.  Because we eat plants.  And plants make oxygen.  And plants do great here, as long as they have all the window space facing the sun.  Sometimes I want to pretend to be a plant, so I can get some sun.  Too bad, it’s not allowed.

One thing I like to do is read.  I’m not sure what everyone else is doing.  Working hard on being equal to each other.  I’d say “you do you” but no one is allowed to talk like that.

I write songs sometimes.  And other times, I sing songs.  They’re all old, because no one writes anymore.  I sing like no one is listening, because I am such a loner (not allowed, by the way)

 

 

Part 2 –Report from Alien High Command on Observation of Human Behavior

On November 12^th, the one human who is not, mute was singing again.  We can hear everything that happens on that space station, because, of course, we have relatively enormous ears.  Our ears are, like, as big as our genitals.  Hell, our ears ARE our genitals, because what could be more important that singing?

That’s why no one was interested in the humans for a long time.  That is, until I proved that one of their species was in a state of evolution.  He was developing into a singer.

The name of the space station, as far as we can tell, is The Allegory, because any meaning in its existence is buried so far up its ass that most of its inhabitants are just not aware.  Of anything.

Speaking of meaning, does anyone else at command have thoughts on the words this human is singing?

He sings in the shower.  The acoustics are not good.  So, what we think he’s singing is:
God Bless Some Erica

By singing this, followed by even more allegorical nonsense, we can see his deep sensitivity to random shit.

Does God love everyone equally?  His Party’s ideology seems to suggest this.

By this logic, God must love every Erica.  And yet, this person wants to love, and through his example, wants us to love, not just the Erica we’re with, but Some Erica.

Erica must truly be a blessed name.  What did she do to be so blessed?  By being unlovable in whatever way she might be so, does he not transcend judgment by accepting her, sight unseen?

Erica, by his description, is a Land he loves, with Oceans, Prairies and Mountains white with foam.  So, maybe he is intimately familiar with her body.  Maybe he wants to live on her, someday.

I hope Some Erica is real.  Wouldn’t that be some shit?

Ever since I got married, I’ve been eating a lot of jam sandwiches.  This is because my spouse is allergic to nut butter.  We had a lengthy debate about “sun butter”, which is a substitute not made from nuts, since it contains only ground-up sunflower seeds.  The final decision was, it tastes too much like nut butter, how can it not contain nuts, no, no, absolutely not.

I suspect that if I were incarcerated, I would have the option of eating sun butter and jelly sandwiches.  I brought this up at home, and was advised not to make jokes about the American penal system, because we are lesbians.  I agree, we are free not to make jokes that imply the patriarchy exists.

There are a lot of things out there that are offensive to a lot of people.  Still, I like things that bring me joy.  I love the painting “Starry Night” by Vincent Van Gogh.  I bought a poster of it and hung it on our bedroom ceiling.  It was not easy to stick it up there.  After I had the stars on the ceiling, I loved to lie looking up at it.  This was joy-inducing because we live in New York and we don’t get stars like that.  I only saw stars anything like that the time I went to Nova Scotia.  That sure was a peaceful place.  Also, I have agoraphobia so I don’t like going outside to places where I can see stars.  Only inside, thank you very much.  Shortly after I decorated our bedroom, my spouse demanded an explanation.  I told them that Van Gogh’s art brings me joy.  They calmly reminded me that said art never brought Van Gogh joy, otherwise why would he have taken his own ear off?  Do I want to feel sublime feelings while dead artists suffer?

I don’t mean to imply that I treat anything my spouse says as a joke.  Once, really the first and last time I was invited to meet their family, I found myself in their converted farmhouse on Cape Breton Island, getting to know the parents and their three cats.  One of these furballs, nicknamed Cooter, suddenly arched his back and jumped from the ground to the top of the linen cabinet.  “Get down from there, monkey,” said my spouse’s Mom.  My spouse arched their back and calmly reminded Mom, “we can’t call a cat monkey.  It’s racist.”  Naturally, I didn’t try to contradict my spouse.  It was only a few years later, when I was working as a librarian—and lemme tell you, what a great career for an agoraphobic lesbian, a total “inside job”—a patron returned a book called The National Geographic Book of Why.

This book had explanations for all the things in the world around us, which of course I never walk around in because I’m afraid and I’m married and very content, as I have elaborated above.  One page asked why playground structures are called jungle gyms and monkey bars.  Apparently, a Chicago lawyer named Sebastian Hinton patented the Junglegym in the 1920s.  He came from a family of mathematicians who wanted to help children explore the third and fourth dimension and beyond, and figured the only way to teach kids about space was to give them a way to climb and explore their innate “monkey instinct”.  The Hinton family’s research led to sci-fi stories like “A Wrinkle In Time” and many more.  But the original patent for the Junglegym uses the word “monkey” like 50 times.  I know.  I’m a librarian.  I read it.

Is it possible that someone out there is offended that a mathematician wants humans to embrace their inner monkey?  Was he a Communist, too?  Or is that a species-specific thing?

My spouse once told me they don’t mind if I read banned books, as long as I do it inside the library.  Bringing conflict into our house is just bad karma.  For similar reasons, at our wedding we exchanged conflict-free cubic zirconia.  I do wear jewelry and have a large collection of precious stone rings, but I wear them on my toes, where my spouse is not likely to see them.

You see, why can’t what’s below have as vibrant a color spectrum as what’s above, meaning the sky or the removed poster of Van Gogh?  Why can’t my inner life outshine anything that I dare not show on the outside?

Every time I go to the Renaissance Faire (which my spouse gently reminds me should be referred to as a Medieval Faire, since that’s the kind of stuff you find there), every time I sit in the Joust pavilion, dressed in my nun’s outfit with the thick veil—OK, sometimes I leave the house but it has to be for a very good reason—every time I am watching the knights joust, I secretly wish a horse will lose control and run into the stands and skewer me like a kebab.  I will get lifted into the air on the end of a big lance, and as my body is waved around, rainbows and sonatas will pour out me into the world that wasn’t colorful enough right before.

The Trucker Who Fringed

By Ed Malin

I met him at a café in Winnington.  It was a wonderful Canadian summer day.  Folks were swarming the town because of the upcoming Rainbow Fringe Festival.  Posters for theatrical productions covered every available space, and even some that weren’t available, like the side of a big 18-wheeler.

What surprised me most about him, and this is relative, since so much surprised me, is that he saw some performers plastering a sign to the side of said big rig, which was parked to the side of the street café, and encouraged the actors to keep putting up their sign.  It was his 18-wheeler, after all.  He never did tell me how he parallel-parked it on the corner of Portage and Whyte.

Not only did he not object to the postering, but, since he was reading the official Fringe Festival newspaper at the time, he recognized the name of their production and asked them what they thought were its selling points.  Who ever heard of a trucker who loves going to the theater?

I was there as an arts journalist. Well, I had planned to be in Winnington to cover my girlfriend’s show. Till she broke up with me. Tough luck, eh? That’s what happens when someone hits the road to tour a show, they call you up to say they’ve had a change of heart. Which begs the question: was there a heart in there to change?

The trucker didn’t need to know that, but I told him anyway. He then calmly asked for the name of my ex girl’s show. He would see it on my behalf and let me know how it went. The guy was really planning to see the whole Festival.  I said that was was very nice but… He mentiioned it was his vacation, and in practice the only time he could be around other people. Besides, he knew a thing or two about exes himself.

As I was saying thank you, he gave he a tooney. The suggestion was for me.to go get a Labatt Bleue, since I had the blues already. If I needed him, his rig shouldn’t be hard to find.

Next time we had coffee together, I asked if he’d seen anything good so far. He said he liked the ladies of Winnington, the way they just smiled at you. I clarified, had he seen any good shows in the Festival?

So far, he saw “NASA Bahamas”, a dystopian future where space exploration operations are moved from Florida and Texas to the Caribbean, everyone gets real chill, and no actual space missions ever happen.

And then he saw “Only Poodles Are Toys”, which was a rom-com and fairly self-explanatory.

This led him to talk about his life. He hit the road when his wife cheated on him.  Which was Valentine’s Day five years ago.  A time he refers to as his Bison tenial.

He asked if Big John John Terwilliger was my given name.

I told him, “it’s a stage name…like Deutero-Isaiah”.

But was I actually on stage, then?

“I had been, in the before times..I kept the name. It might come in handy when the time was right.”

 

The next day, the trucker approached me. He had figured out that my ex was in a show of her own devising, entitled “Trudy Cool”.  It was about Gertrude Stein and the living of the literary life in Paris.

You know, he said, I had to learn French in school because this is a bilingual country, eh?  Trudy Cool, that sounds like something not so nice in French.

For a guy who spent so much time on the road by himself, well, he certainly didn’t have to speak another language.

Then he told.me, he loves to sing along to French ballads on the radio.

We went through his favorites: Françoise Madeleine Hardy, Jean-Jacques Goldman, Celine Dion.  We never did get to talk about the actual show.

 

Next time I was heading through that part of town, I saw the Trucker about to go into a venue.  I waved to him from the venue across the street, which I was entering.  We met up afterwards, for a Molson or three.

“What did you see?” I asked

He smiled.  “Leave Room For Milk – an improv show where the AUDIENCE creates the story.”

“Any good?”

“Sometimes the audience has too much going on.”

I thought this was a generous assessment.  I thought of him driving along in his truck, no one else around, which leaves plenty of room for milk.

“How about your show?” he asked.

I told him about “Lover In Law”.

“Sounds intriguing,” he said.

“I mean, yeah, but.  Anyone who would marry my brother, I don’t see myself getting the hots for her.”

He paused.  “I had a twin brother, but he died.”

“I’m sooorrry,” I said.

“It was many moons ago.  Still, what if she couldn’t tell the difference?  What if this Lover In Law had been manipulated?”

I nodded and decided this topic of conversation was for hosers.

 

He flagged me down on the street the next day.  “I think there’s a woke show in the Festival this year.”

“Oh that’s progress.  I think they tried to get one last year, but couldn’t get anyone from the U.S. to agree to travel here and perform.”

“Well, do you have time to see it?” he asked.

“Which one is it again?”
“Malcolm the IXth.”

“Why does that sound familiar?”

“Oh, well it’s like they took Malcolm X but put him into Macbeth.”

“You’re supposed to say the Scottish Play.”

“I’ll give it a try, and keep an open mind.”

“Sorry,” I said, “I promised I would go see Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and Zombies.”

His eyes lit up.  “Is that by the same folks who did Beavis and Butthead and Zombies last year?”
“No,” I said, “I think it’s just a coincidence.

 

We ran into each other at the after hours club for the Festival performers, which was called Mike A Delic.  If you wanted to, you could get up and preview little bits from your show, or freestyle some verse.  When I entered the glorious basement space which was hosting Mike A Delic, the first thing I saw was his eyes, focused on the person on stage, who was my ex girl.

She screeched into the mic “I am Gertrude Stein, hard as rock!  You are all a lost generation but I am a lesbian and I have collected you, like cats!  You can all lick me, you pussies!”  Somehow, a flash of smoke happened.  And then she was gone from the stage.

A minute later, I came down the stairs, trying to unsee what I had seen.  He may have been doing the same thing.  It was dark, but I think he might have been crying.

“You have a good day?” he asked.

 

Leaving one of the many Festival venues one day, I saw the trucker. Given the total number of shows in the Festival, I was surprised that we’d both chosen to see “Anna Freud and the King of Siam”. For a moment, we both seemed poised to ask each other about this ambitious new piece of work.

“I learned so much about her…”

“Who? Anna Freud or Anna Leonowens?”

“Neither had been on my reading list before this.”

“The thing is, he stammered, I fell asleep in the middle.”

“I breathed a sigh of relief. I loved it, but I fell asleep at the end.”

“Do you think between us we can piece together the whole story?”

“Mind if I ask you, since you fell asleep, what did you dream about?”

“Who says I have dreams?”

“This wouldn’t be Freudian analysis if you didn’t have dreams.”

“Very well. I dreamt I was in a nice, warm, cozy chair. Well, it was like being in my rig, driving, except I never sleep and drive. Ya might hit a caribou, and who’ll be laughin’ then?”

We had intrigued each other to a stalemate, but neither of us had time to go back and see the show for a second time, with so many Festival offerings, of course, so I bought the show’s stage manager a box of Tim Hortons donut holes and obtained the script for the show in question.  The Trucker and I read it out loud, and this is how it went:

 

I woke up hurting from whatever I drank last night.

I know I was wicked to myself, but am not wise enough to know why.

It’s at times like this that I think about Anna Freud and the King of Siam.

No, I am not getting confused with Anna and the King of Siam a.k.a. The King and I, because my life is not a fucking musical.

Anna Freud will go down in history as the first woman who was told at birth that she had daddy issues, thus sparing her the trouble of working it out for herself.

Anna Freud knew exactly who her father was, and tracked everyone else in the world to make sure they had a normal level of attachment.  What was it like for her on Sundays?  Get the fuck off that couch!  But I’m tired, Papa!  Only people who don’t know what’s wrong with them are permitted to lie down on that couch.  You, in contrast, know exactly what’s wrong with you!

But, now that I think about it, there was a real woman named Anna Leonowens, who went to Siam in the 1860s, and helped the Younger King survive the psychic guilt of his father, the Older King.  There was a whole harem of children from this one Royal father, a very vengeful person by all accounts, and one legitimate heir, who was coming to terms with who he was supposed to be.  How horrifying.

You know what else is weird?  Based on his date of birth in 1856, Sigmund Freud himself could have been one of those kids who grew up in the harem not the heir to the throne.  Depending on one’s view of reincarnation, naturally.

Getting to know you.  Getting to know all about you?  If you did not disclose the reasons you are fucked up, nowadays that can only mean either you don’t know them or you don’t want to know them.  Don’t come at me with this it’s all good bullshit.

Because I wouldn’t call the Young King of Siam ruthless, I mean he does look so handsome in the musical, but without the very judgey, sarcastic, Western widow Anna Leonowens coming into his court to educate him, one might imagine that Siam, now known as Thailand, may have been finger-fucked by France along with its neighbors Laos and Cambodia. 

The power of Women Freuds is not purely my invention.  The great jazz bassist Charles Mingus, who was depressed and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy hadn’t been invented yet, who was the one and only musician ever fired by congenial bandleader Duke Ellington, who he saw as a father and was trying to please, this same Mingus recorded an improvisational twist on the standard song “All The Things You Are”.  His version was called “All The Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother”.  If you don’t believe me, I have it on vinyl.

Here’s to taking a good, hard look at your problems.  Here’s to sharing your troubles with your trusted friends, or people who challenge you, or both?  And if you liked the performance here in Winnington, tell your friends in Saskatoon because we’re planning a “transference” to their Festival.  Thank you.

 

The next day, we had agreed to meet for brunch.  It took me a while to persuade the Trucker to meet me at this time, and he was wary of the hype.  But when we met, he said he was familiar with the concept of eating breakfast at 1 PM after waking up from a snooze in his rig in a parking lot.

On that note, I asked him if there was anything else he wanted to see in this fine city, to which he replied he had always wanted to go to the big Provincial Museum.  So we went.

There was a lovely exhibit about how the animals of the Plains survived so well given the relative lack of light pollution from big human cities.

“That explains why they always run in front of my 18-wheeler out on the highway,” he mused.  “Not used to people.”

I felt sad.
“I’ve gotten good at swerving to avoid the four-legged ones.”

The exhibit had a lot of info on bats which are nocturnal and have their own set of plants that open their petals after dark just to get pollinated by flying creatures.

He nodded.  “Night flight is a lifestyle choice.”
I strolled to the next case, which showed how coral reefs release large batches of hormones at night so everything can get fertilized.

“Wow.  Just wow.”

“it is pretty deep,” he agreed.

 

As the end of the Festival approached, I offered to take the Trucker to a nice place for drinks.  This was The Proseccutor, the wine bar across the street from the Provincial Courthouse.  We got ourselves a bottle of bubbly, and laughed and cried about all the shows we had managed to see.  Indeed, there were a few we had missed, and the odds were these would get transubstantiated to the upcoming Calgary Fringe, for those who didn’t mind driving a ways and planning to be out further West in a few weeks.

 

Nearly a bottle in, he looked me in the eye.  “She didn’t deserve you.”

I thought that was a nice thing to say, but wanted to make sure who she was.

“My daughter.”

Now I was feeling drunk.  “Do I know your daughter?”
“Perhaps you thought you did,” he intimated.

“Who is this person?” I asked, after sipping some more.

“The one in the show about Trudy Stein.”

“She’s YOUR daughter?”

“I have only seen her on and off for the last 20 years, man.”

“You know the girl I was dating for the last two years?”

“What are the odds, eh?”

“You show up for this Festival, you go to a show I talk you into seeing, and then you figure out the performer is your estranged child?”
“I didn’t realize at first.  Well, I saw the show and had mixed feelings about it.  Then I saw her at that Open Mic thing and I wanted to go say hi.”

“Did you say hi?” I asked, knowing he hadn’t, because I had been with him and he hadn’t talked to her.

“Do you know how many letters, and postcards, and emails I sent that child?”

I nodded.  “Does she blame you for something?”

“There were a lot of things I did wrong when I was trying to be a father to her.  So much staying in one place.  I’m a much better person now that I’m a trucker!”

“I think we should drink more,” I said, scouting around for a server.

“Well, before we get into that, here are my written impressions of Trudy Cool.”  He slid me several hand-written note pages.

I smiled.  “Thank you.  Admittedly, I bit the bullet last night and went to her final show.  I wanted to do the job I promised to do, but also to see a fairly crowded performance so she wouldn’t notice me.”

“And how did it go, eh?”

“Actually, for 9 PM on a Friday, there were very few people in the audience.  But I don’t see this as a reflection on her.  Most people don’t know anything about art and literature.”

“Did she see you?”

“Yes, she called out to me during the curtain call, asked me to stay.”

“Oh, I had no idea.  What did you she say to you?”

“She said she had changed her mind about me, that I was the bigger person for coming to see the show after all that had happened.”

“Good point.”
“If I was looking for her forgiveness in order to feel good about myself, that might have done something.  I wasn’t, though.  It just made me realize she had gotten a few things right.  A hundred years later and the world is still messed up, the brightest minds are still going abroad and we never know if the last war was just a dress rehearsal for the next one.”

He looked at me.  “That tracks for me.”

It was getting near last call.  We uncorked.  We laughed.  We cried.  We needed to take a piss.  Thank goodness there are Fringe Festivals.  They’re like the Olympic Games, back in the day, but it isn’t a bunch of naked guys doing athletics.  It’s just people speaking their minds while they still can.

THE END

“A Good Day for No-ter Daym”

 

Today, thanks to Nico Barsamian and A Writing Circle, I got the chance to read at the New York City Poetry Festival on Governor’s Island.  It was very loud out there, with helicopters flying above.  I re-recorded the audio and am sharing it here.

After some strange anti-Jewish sentiment in the USA, I thought it would be helpful to explain what really happened during the Last Supper….

 

Jesus: Dearly Beloved, thank you for joining me in this olive garden.

 

Matthew: Oh yeah, man, no sweat. I love the unlimited crackers. I’m trying to see if it’s true you can’t eat five in a row without your mouth drying up.

 

Andrew: Philip, should we tell him it’s called matzah?

 

Philip: Andrew, he’s a tax collector in the springtime, let him be happy he came to this lovely dinner in the first place.

 

Jesus: As I was saying. Well, you know me, let’s do this through a parable. Judas, since it is Passover, would you please recite the Four Questions?

Judas I.: Who me?

 

Jesus: Is there anyone else here named Judas?

 

Everyone: YES!

 

Judas I.: Fabulous. Here we go. (clears throat) Why is this night different from all other nights?

 

Jesus: Because, by the end of this night, one of you will betray me one time and one of you will deny me three times..

 

Didymus: I doubt this very much.

 

Bartholemew: Didymus, all you ever do is doubt things. It’s probably you.

 

Didymus: Oh, I don’t know.

 

Bartholemew: Tell him, James son of Zebedee!

 

James: Zebedee Zebedee that’s all folks!

 

John: Excuse me, I just have to go to the John for a moment.

 

Philip: Don’t leave, man. If you miss something, your version of this story might somewhat diverge from other retellings.

 

Jesus: I won’t keep you in suspense. One of the guys who I said would do one of the things is…the Apostle Formerly Known As Simon.

 

Peter: You can call me Peter, you know.

 

Jesus: Listen, Apostle Formerly Known As Simon, you are already showing the proof that you shall cock-block me before dawn.

 

Peter: I’m here to help.

 

Jesus: Maybe. But who will betray me, I wonder?

 

Andrew: It’s probably Thaddeus. He never says anything anyway, just listens. How annoying is that?

 

Jesus: I will think that over.

 

Judas I.: In the mean time, will you excuse me? I just have to go put money in the parking meter for the donkey that you rode into Jerusalem.

Jesus: Man, if that’s what you gotta do.

Judas I.: (as he steps over and around other participants) Pardon me. Excuse me. Sorry. A thousand pardons. (He exits.)

Jesus: Does anyone else know any of the Four Questions?

 

Simon the Zealot: Where’s the wine?

 

Jesus: That is an excellent question!