Some Fun For You, But Not Until You Wade Through A Big Bunch Of Kvetching

Edward Albee, who bears a passing resemblance to my Uncle Jim

Have I told you lately that I love you? Well, it's true. Nothing makes my day like a whole bunch of comments. Therefore, today I am whoring for them. They won't be as heartfelt, but - like an ungainly 15-year-old at the mercy of rampant hormonal change - I am willing to take your pity and pretend it is because I have a hot bod.

I spent a great part of this weekend thinking about writing. I never once actually sat down at the keyboard and tried to knock something out. Every time I considered it, I got mildly discouraged. For one thing, it takes forever for the stone-age computer I have at home to warm up and actually be ready for me to tickle it with my fingers. If it was always on - always willing and pliable, like this slutty computer at work - then I might have gotten past my reticence. However, after waiting five minutes for the frigid electronic bitch at home to be willing to accept my words, my literary hard-on invariably went limp.

It's not all the computer's fault, of course. If I had something that I really, truly had to get out of my system, then I would have waited for it to boot. Fact is, I have a few good stories to tell, but I just didn't find the inspiration to devote a couple of hours to the telling. I will, sometime soon - for all of them - but I just didn't have it this weekend.

(Truth be told, I was enjoying a bunch of other stuff, too. The Masters was on; the Red Sox were playing the Yankees; The Celtics had a couple of games; The Bruins - God, yes, the I-haven't-cared-a-whit-for-about-ten-years-now Bruins - were in the playoffs; and Boston College was winning the NCAAs in hockey.

On the other hand, I had stuff weighing on my mind in a decidedly wish-I-didn't-have-it-there fashion. My Uncle Jim went to the hospital on Thursday. He's now doing OK following a hernia operation, but it was an unexpected bit of bad news. Worse for him to have on his mind, than me on mine, of course.

The rest of it is certainly lesser on the tragedy scale. I should have changed the oil in my car. I put that off after going to the local Quickie Jiffy Speedy Lube and finding a line waiting. I was going to get a haircut, but found a similar crowding of customers at the barber shop. I also forgot to return two Ramones videos I borrowed from the library, so now it's 20 cents a day until I do. I'm telling you - my life is just falling apart at the seams!)

Yesterday, MY WIFE and I went to The Lyric Stage, a small theater in Boston to which we have season subscriptions. It is a nice place to see a production. It is intimate (seats about 250) and after having been subscribers for 17 years, we know a fair amount of the actors and actresses, so look forward to particular productions we know they'll be in.

(MY WIFE subscribed for quite a few years before we met, so her ties go back well over 20 years.)

We saw a play called Three Tall Women by Edward Albee. I was bored out of my skull for much of the production, despite the presence of Paula Plum - one of my favorite local actresses. MY WIFE, on the other hand, enjoyed the play. Afterwards, she surmised that you probably had to be a woman to get it all and enjoy it, even though it was written by a man. I think she's right. The play concerns one woman, now very aged and bedridden, shown in three different stages of her earlier life. The three incarnations of her previous self discuss her own life with each other - what they might have done differently, what they regret, etc.

I spent much of the play thinking about how I would have written the same thing, albeit with a man as the lead. For one thing, I would have lopped off the first act completely. Far too much exposition. Secondly, it would have contained a whole lot more laughs. And I'd have finished it with the main character dying. Well, maybe not that. But, by the time the curtain came down yesterday, that's what I wanted to have happened to all three of her incarnations - and as quickly as possible, too.

Be that as it may - and it may as well be - we now enter the whoring portion of today's post. I'm going to ask you to supply me with fodder for a future post. If you've made it this far, through the muddy mess above, then you deserve to have a little fun. I hope you'll enjoy this.

In the comments, I want you to give me two lines of dialogue. They can be any length, but brevity is the soul of wit.

(Or so I've heard; I obviously don't practice it.)

I will, at a later date, incorporate those two lines - and the two lines I receive from everybody else - into a short play. For instance, you could say something like the following:

1 - "I see you've bought a new hat."

2 - "And that's how I came to have a turnip as my mistress."

In other words, say anything you want. It will be my challenge to jam all of the lines received into one more-or-less coherent story, tying together the wildly disparate into a tame parrot.

(You know I've reached the end of the line, on any particular day, when my puns make no sense whatsoever. That was it.)

Each person who contributes the requisite two lines will become a character in the play. This will be in lieu of any royalties, should the thing ever be produced.

You know your job. Now do it. And I thank you.