post by Evan Schenck
Here's two short monologues I wrote for No-Shame Theater this season, with short notes to go with:
An Open Letter and Statement of Principles
by Evan Schenck
[lights up]
Dear United States Congress,
First off it is not just you that I'm addressing here in this letter, congress. I also want you to send copies of this letter to the pope in Rome, to the anti-pope in anti-Rome, to Barack Obama Alleged President of the United States, to the Rockefellers and Rothschilds and the Freemasons and Illuminati, to the Mafia, which I believe is also located in Rome but not at the same address as the pope, and to the media. Make sure you get a letter to all of the different media because I don't want anybody to feel left out. I would have sent copies to these people myself but I could not get their addresses so I want you to do it for me. My taxes would pay your salary, if I actually paid any. So you have to do what I say.
Anyway I am getting to my point now which is that you have got to do something about all the problems facing America. Dark forces are gathering. I am seeing you guys on the TV all the time talking about health care and the Panama Canal but you are always missing the point. This debate about public options, illegal immigrants, triggers, and so on, are not realistic and are not addressing the real problems of today. I am writing you to talk about the elephant in the room, the big issue that everybody is always tiptoeing around, which is that the president is assaulting the nature of reality through witchcraft. You all know what I am talking about, especially the pope. The President's idea of health care reform is to take health care from Americans who have it now, and transmute it from a written agreement between those Americans and insurance companies into a physical object. I have it on good authority that the President has already turned our healthcare into a series of delicate glass tubes. Some of these tubes will be smashed, some will be given to illegal aliens, and the rest will be shipped to the President's dual homelands of Kenya and Indonesia . The upshot is that foreigners and illegal immigrants will have healthcare in the form of magical glass tubes, and Americans will not.
This is not the only issue, by far. The President also plans to perform similar occult ceremonies on other abstract concepts including the emotions that average Americans experience on a daily basis. On Tuesday my daughter watched Obama's address to America's schoolchildren. She tells me that during this speech he cast a spell on her, and that when she got home from school and watched her stories she no longer found the Golden Girls funny. I am 110% certain that the president turned her laughter and amusement into a tiny man who now serves him as a butler. I demand that the president produce his true birth certificate showing him to have been born in both Indonesia and Kenya, that he cease his theft of our health care, that he cremate his secret dwarf butler alive on a pyre built from the wood of a sacred oak-tree so that my daughters sense of humor can return to her in the form of vapor, and finally that he resign from the presidency. I do not think these demands are unreasonable. These acts of witchcraft, which give physical form to imaginary goods, cannot go on. How long before the President turns the Pledge of Allegiance into a pair of shoes, or the nation's collective memory of Abraham Lincoln into a rocket-ship? Not long, I fear. Take heed, Congress, and listen to my warning, before all is lost.
Love and Kisses,
Evan Schenck
[lights down]
I don't usually perform political humor or even go near current events because I think it usually sucks, and I worry about that stuff enough without involving an innocent audience, but this piece was performed on September 11. Cloud-Cuckoo-Land was getting crowded and I thought there was potential for actual comedy there, even though the primary emotions I experienced over the death panel kerfluffle were more in the vein of bemusement and sadness. To get past that I resorted to one of my favorite devices, which is asserting a premise that is patently impossible or illogical--the real problem with Barack Obama is that he is turning abstract concepts into tangible objects. I like ideas like that, especially when they involve specific details.
This piece went pretty well on stage, aided in large part by an audience that was large and kind of jazzed up by the other performances. I brought a little more manic energy to it than my usual subdued method and I think it worked.
The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains
or
The Spirit of the 19th Century
by Evan Schenck
[lights up]
Joachim Wheellock Hammersmith was born in 1815. He was Joachim after the saint, Wheellock after the type of pistol, and Hammersmith after his father, who was a minor official of the British East India company based in Calcutta. J.W. Hammersmith made his first fortune growing opium in Bengal for sale in China. In 1845 he moved to the Ottoman Empire and made his second fortune by founding a company which claimed to arrange pilgrimages to Jeruselam or Mecca but which in fact simply robbed and murdered its customers. Hammersmith increased his profit margins and disposed of the corpses by butchering them and selling the meat to the local Arabs, claiming that it was actually lamb. After being chased out of the holy land by an angry mob, he moved to Britain.
Hammersmith was an early pioneer of the company town concept, in which he made his employees live in a town that he owned and forced them into debt so that they were effectively his slaves. A minor scandal occurred in 1852 when the Times of London reported that each family under his authority was forced to draw a pint of their own blood each month, which was collected by carriage and taken to Hammersmith's enormous mansion, which was a replication of Buckingham Palace sitting on top of a replication of Versailles. He refuted accusations that he was a vampire by revealing that he did not actually do anything with the blood but instead just dumped it in the River Tyne.
By 1888 Hammersmith was widely regarded as the wealthiest and most evil man who had ever lived. That year he was strongly suspected by many in London of being Jack the Ripper, to which he famously replied, “What's this fuss about five prostitutes? Think of my work in Africa. I have probably killed a million men and intend to kill several millions more, but the evil things I do aren't against the law.” To illustrate his point, he sent instructions to the American office of Wheellock LLC to cause the extinction of a major species, adding “I don't care which.” The last known passenger pigeon died in 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo.
As he grew older, Hammersmith began to worry about death. Specifically, he was convinced that he was going to be condemned to Hell. Initially he funded scientific research into an immortality vaccine, but after a close reading of the Bible he realized that, even if he were immortal, he would still be damned upon the second coming of Jesus. He thus refocused his efforts. In 1900 he moved to the United States and hired Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla to build a machine to kill God, the enmity between the two inventors finally culminating in a fist fight. Edison pushed Tesla to the ground, sat on his chest, and rubbed a handful of pearl necklaces in Tesla's hair, mortifying the deeply obsessive-compulsive Serbian inventor and putting an immediate end to the project.
However, Hammersmith discovered a passage in the bible, Judges 1:19. “And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.” On the strength of this passage Hammersmith ordered a vast mobile tomb to be constructed in his Australian holdings, in the form of an enormous steam-driven iron chariot. Edison dutifully designed the vehicle, which was two hundred feet high, four hundred feet wide, and a thousand feet long. On the front of the chariot was a immense excavator and refinery complex, so that as it surged across the outback at forty-five miles an hour, the chariot could constantly strip mine the coal it needed to continue operations.
Hammersmith bought one hundred infants, 50 male and 50 female. He gave strict instructions that they be raised mute, without language, and taught nothing except the task of maintaining the chariot, so that when the time came to begin his journey they could be sealed inside with his body, living as his slaves after his death, bearing and raising generations of children within the black metallic confines of his cyclopean nomad mausoleum as it drove ever onward into eternity, defying the final justice of God himself. When J.W. Hammersmith died in 1916, his instructions were followed to the letter.
To this day, Hammersmith's tomb can still be seen traversing the deserts of Australia, carving the sacred land of the aborigine's into a blasted moonscape, spewing a column of fire and smoke a mile high by day and night, its 30 steam whistles shrieking an unintelligible babble of discordant notes.
[lights down]
This is my favorite piece of the several I've done so far this year and I was really pleased by it in spite of how heavy-handed the metaphors are. Mark Twain made an appearance in the first version but it was quite a bit too long and had to be cut. I found this piece fun to write and fun to read. It's a treat to toss off phrases like "cyclopean nomad mausoleum" or "blasted moonscape," but one so seldom gets the chance.
In performance it came on kind of slow, because it wasn't immediately clear to the audience what kind of story it was, but they eventually got that it was a kind of absurd narrative and they were laughing by the end.
There's another piece I did last Friday, but I think I might sit on that one until later on, in case I do another piece in the coming show.
Evan Schenck
also posted to his own blog
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