—Faithfully, Boz
Dear Thackeray,
Collins returns my fourteen mins., unread, mewling that it is “ill fortune” to see another’s Work, when one is oneself performing! For it transpires that Wilkie C. is to première his own mirthful (!) rodomontade this very evening in the back room at White’s Club. Pray attend, and tell me what he has thieved of my own life’s blood, my Act!
—Boz
Mr. Collins, Sir,
Thackeray tells of your stupendous success with a “Corn Riot” joke last evening, at White’s. I find this fascinating, though not, I grant, as much so as do my Solicitors.
Tit for tat, I am performing a new “Victoria Regina & the Gillie” notion in my monologue to-night at the Lyceum, which would not, I think, sound entirely unfamiliar to you!
—C. D.
Dear Thackeray,
Regarding your inquiry, I have misplaced the Grt. Expectations ms., but it is of no moment, I shall recapitulate the 14 chapters to-day on the train to Newcastle.
Prosody! Had ever tho’t my Novelizing a true Sisyphusean Labour; yet only now can know the far greater agony & pain of that Institution of Intellectual Industry nonpareil, Stand-Up.
It is all in the timing of things, Thackeray; what swarms with Life on the flat, written page becomes but a dead grey mackerel in its utterance upon the stage, without the properly measured timing of its delivery. Nor can it, cf. Collins, be taught.
I close with the promise to read your new Book soonest. Now, off to audit Trollope, who begs my attendance at his new Routine at a local caravansary.…
—Boz
Mr. Collins, Sir,
That I choose to publickly indorse Musgrave’s Ague Elixir should be of no account to you, whose success has not made necessary the support of seven in service, three houses, and a villa, plus several barouches.
—D.
Bulwer-Lytton,
I surmise that the Thack tattles, and puts you up to what he, himself, would fain do, namely, to pester and afflict a busy Entertainer with verbal Boils. Gt. Expect’ns (I lack time to write it out entire) goes forward. It picks up speed. It careers. I have the idea of a cataclysmic Stage Coach Crash, which would dispatch Pip, Magwitch, Jaggers, Miss Havisham, and Bentley Drummle, and leave Herbert Pocket to wrap it up in an Epilogue, shortening the epic by two doz. chapters. Stand-up teaches nightly, that Brevity is the Thing.
—The Boz
Thack!
If I may so address you, for we stage-folk ever prefer the informal against the formal amongst ourselves …
Enclosed cutting from this morning’s Optic shows who bested whom at last evening’s Crimean War Relief Benefit Recital. ’Tis true, Thack—Collins was heckled by the Duke of Clarence himself when he quite forgot the punch-line to the “Irish Question” soliloquy! (Do you know a “ghost” who could pick up Gt. Expect. where I left off months ago? No time!)
—The Boz
Trollope,
The Lady whom you so flippantly described as my “niece” last Evening at the Garrick is, in fact, Miss Joywell, my protégée, and a distinguished Graduate of my Comedic Work Shop.
Yrs., The Boz
B.-L.,
Have reserved two tickets for you & a friend at Blackpool Tuesday eve next, late show. Come thither. Silly goose, ’twas but a jest, anent the Stage Coach Crash! I now think I can quickly be done with Gt. Ex. by this expedient, that Pip suddenly wakes, to find all was a dream.
—Believe me, the Boz
Thack!
Finished Expectations after oysters & champagne in the early hours of this morning, only to get the d——thing away, so I can work on perfecting a wonderful new Disraeli jest. Alas, I cannot attend your Début as Napoleon III as some friends ask me down for the weekend. (I am told that that vixen Actress Miss L——is invited also!) Must rush!
Love you, The Boz
Dear Mister Collins,
I have at hand your most interesting Proposal, received today. “Dickens & Collins,” I believe, and so, too, my client, would sound more comely; he suggests that you trust his ear for names, which is not unremarked. We must also insist that his name always take the topmost place, type twice the size of yours, owing to his greater fame, and, likewise, that his share of all proceeds be 75 percent, as his Reward for “pulling you along” with him in regards ticket sales and public Curiosity. Perhaps we can thus conjoin with you, to the end of concluding a fair Contract.
Very sincerely yours,
Blitz (for the Boz)
1993
PAUL RUDNICK
THE GOSPEL OF DEBBIE
RECENT works like The Passion of the Christ and The Da Vinci Code seek to illuminate the life of Jesus. Not long ago, an additional text was discovered in an ancient linen backpack found in a cave outside Jerusalem, surrounded by what appeared to be early-Roman candy wrappers and covered with stickers reading “I ♥ All Faiths” and “Ask Me About Hell.” A parchment diary found inside the backpack appears to contain the musings of one Debbie of Galilee. Many of the pages are still being translated from high-school Aramaic; here are some persuasive excerpts:
OCTOBER 5
I saw him in the marketplace! Everyone says that he’s the son of God, but I don’t care one way or the other because he’s just so CUTE!!! Okay, he’s not hot like a gladiator or a centurion, but he’s really sensitive and you can tell that he thinks about things and then goes, “Be nice to people,” and I’m like, that is SO TRUE, and I wonder if he’s seeing anyone!
OCTOBER 21
Everyone says that he’s just totally good and devoted to all humanity and that he was sent to save us and that’s why he doesn’t have time for a girlfriend, although I swear I saw Mary Magdalene doodling in the sand with a stick, writing “Mrs. Jesus Christ” and “Merry Xmas from Mary and Jesus Christ and All the Apostles,” with little holly leaves all around it. And I’m like, Mary, are you dating Jesus? and she says, no, he’s just helping me, and I’m like, you mean with math? and she’s like, no, to not be such a whore. And I said, but that is so incredibly sweet, and we both screamed and talked about whether we like him better when he’s healing the lame or with a ponytail.
DECEMBER 25
I wanted to get him the perfect thing for his birthday, so I asked Matthew and he said, well, myrrh is good, but then Luke said, oh please, everyone always gives him myrrh, I bet he wishes those wise men had brought scented candles, some imported marmalade, and a nice box of notecards. So I go, okay, what about accessories, like a new rope belt or clogs or like I could make him a necklace with his name spelled out in little clay letters? and Mark said, I love that, but Luke rolled his eyes and said, Mark, you are just such an Assyrian. So I go to see Mary, Jesus’ mom, and she said that Jesus doesn’t need gifts, that he just wants all of us to love God and be better people, but I asked, what about a sweater? and she said medium.
JANUARY 2
Oh my God, oh my God, I couldn’t believe it, but I was right there, and Jesus used only five loaves of bread and two fish to feed thousands of people, and it was so beautiful and miraculous, and my brother Ezekiel said, whoa, Jesus has invented canapés and I said shut up! And then my best friend Rachel asked, I wonder if he could make my hair really shiny, and I said, you are so disgusting, Jesus shouldn’t waste his time on your vanity, and then Jesus smiled at me and I’m telling you, those last seven pounds, the stubborn ones, they were totally gone! And I spoke unto the angry Roman mob and I said, behold these thighs! Jesus has made me feel better about me!
MARCH 12
Everyone is just getting so mean. They’re all going, Debbie, he is so not divine, Debbie, you’ll believe anything, Debbie, what about last year when you were worshipping ponchos? And I so don’t trust that Judas Iscariot, who’s always staring at me when I walk to the well and he’s saying, hey, Deb, nice jugs, and I’m like, oh ha ha ha, get some oxen.
APRIL 5
So Mary Magdalene tells me that Jesus and all the apostles had this big party and th
at it got really intense and Jesus drank from this golden goblet and now it’s missing and the restaurant is like, this is why there’s a surcharge.
APRIL 23
It’s all over. And it’s been terrible and amazing and I don’t know what any of it means or who’s right and who’s wrong but maybe I’ll figure it out later. Anyway, I’ll always remember what Jesus said to me. He said, Debbie, I can foresee that someday you’ll meet someone, someone wonderful, but for right now let’s at least think about college.
2004
BILLY FROLICK
1992 HOUSE
INTRODUCTION:
The assignment for Mrs. Stanfill’s eighth-grade social-studies class was to pick a year in U.S. history and live for a week as if it were that year, without any of the conveniences available in today’s modern society. I chose 1992, and for extra credit I persuaded my family to participate in the experiment along with me. Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992. A postage stamp cost twenty-nine cents, and Whitey (sp?) Houston had a No. 1 song with “I Will Always Love You,” from a movie starring someone named Kevin Costner, on whom my mother apparently had a major crush.
SCIENTIFIC CONTROLS:
My brother Chris was the most reluctant to participate in the project, as he is way obsessed with the new Maroon 5 CD that he downloaded and didn’t like having to listen to crud like Billy Ray Cyrus and Boyz II Men for the duration of the control period. He has a massive DVD collection, which was out of bounds, too, given that DVDs had not been invented in the olden days of 1992. Though Chris has an abiding attachment to one of the girls on The Real World: Philadelphia, I told him that, for the sake of historical verisimilitude, he had to learn to live without her—and TiVo or his iPod—for a week.
My stepdad Larry’s reaction to the assignment was interesting. He said that maybe he’d go out of town to play golf for the week of the experiment because he wasn’t actually “in the picture” in 1992. My mom nixed that suggestion.
Since the Internet was not in common use back then, Larry needed to check his stocks in the newspaper, which he had to start buying at Starbucks because he usually reads the news online. Thank God Starbucks was around in 1992. (I think. Not sure, and, under the terms of the experiment, I couldn’t Google it.) But I do know that he couldn’t order his usual caramel macchiato, because evidently in 1992 Starbucks barely even served coffee, let alone specialty drinks!!!!
My mom had a “procedure” scheduled for the week of the project and asked if I would make an exception for her, because my cousin Sharon’s bat mitzvah was less than a month away and my mom wanted to make sure she looked okay in the pictures. It’s too bad, because they definitely had bat mitzvahs and photography in 1992. But Botox was not readily available.
So, to keep the integrity of the research project intact, I denied her request and called Dr. Mussman (on a land-line—duh!) to cancel her appointment. By the time she found out and called Dr. Mussman back, the slot was filled, and my mom and I became engaged in a significant altercation. As domestic conflict no doubt existed in 1992, this worked well within the parameters of the experiment. My mother wanted to punish me by depriving me of something that I care about, but just about everything that’s important to me was basically already off limits for the week anyway.
I learned that one of the biggest hardships endured by people back in 1992 was not being able to use cell phones. At first, I had thought that maybe I could just cut back on the number of calls I made, thinking that usage plans were more limited. However, my research (at the library!) unearthed the fact that cell phones really were not in widespread use back then; there were only humongous car-phone versions, prevalent among early executives in the hip-hop industry.
Attending school for a week without my cell phone aroused feelings of depression. It seemed like everyone around me was text-messaging each other, and after a while I became convinced that they were textmessaging about me. I felt really humiliated, and it made me appreciate the world I live in today.
RESEARCH SEGMENT:
Not having the use of a cell phone piqued my curiosity regarding how schoolchildren communicated all those years ago. Since my mother was not speaking to me and Larry wasn’t around (he did end up going to Myrtle Beach), I turned to primary sources (in the form of classic cinema) for answers. I found The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink in the library—on videotape. Through studying these movies, I learned that back in the eighties and nineties students would hand-write things on little pieces of paper called “notes” and try to pass them to each other in class without getting caught.
Upon my return to school, no one wanted to engage in this practice with me because they were all text-messaging each other (probably about me).
BASIC SURVIVAL OBSERVATIONS:
During the period of the experiment, my family subsisted on bread, pasta, rice, and potatoes, just as people did before the turn of the century. My mother said that if you had mentioned food combining or wheat intolerance back in 1992 they might have thrown you into a pond to see if you floated. I have no idea what that means, or who “they” are, but it was the first thing she had said to me in three days and I wanted to avoid another altercation, so I wrote it down.
I discovered that eating so much starch was giving me severe headaches. This, I felt, might explain some of the heinous stuff that was happening in the world back in 1992—weirdos like Ross Perot and Jeffrey Dahmer, or all the rioting that went down in Los Angeles that year. Maybe the grunge look, too.
CONCLUSION:
In conclusion, 1992 was clearly a very confusing, difficult time in which to live in the United States of America. Having to use landlines and eat carbohydrates were hardships for the people to endure, but Americans are nothing if not resilient. If I had been a teenager in 1992, I would have been really challenged to find alternative ways to keep my life interesting, stay thin, and communicate with my peers.
Speaking of which, someone is text-messaging me. I’m so grateful to live in 2005!:)
2005
PAUL RUDNICK
FURTHER PROOF THAT LINCOLN WAS GAY
The first draft of the Gettysburg Address began, “Four score and seven years ago-ish …”
When Lincoln was a boy, he would walk twenty miles through the snow every morning to buy magazines.
Lincoln was raised in a log cabin with a dirt floor, which he vacuumed.
Lincoln liked to say, “All men are created equal, except at the beach.”
Lincoln’s greatest regret was the movie version of Phantom.
Lincoln named his horse Mister Horse.
Lincoln wanted to call it “The Emancipation Proclamation—The New Sensation!”
Lincoln urged Congress to bind the nation’s wounds “with malice toward none, with charity for all,” although under his breath he murmured, “except for a certain red-headed lieutenant, and he knows why.”
As a young country lawyer, Lincoln often bartered his services for house seats.
For more than four years during his twenties, Lincoln shared a bed with his friend Joshua Fry Speed. It is now believed that he loved Joshua Fry Speed for his winning personality, and not because his name sounds like a George Foreman product.
The friendship finally ended when Speed told Lincoln, “You’re not the President of me!”
Another friend, Billy Greene, said that Lincoln’s thighs were “as perfect as a human being’s could be.” Lincoln was said to have responded, “It’s called Pilates.”
Lincoln was known as the Rail-Splitter. Few people realize that this was a cocktail.
When Lincoln was told that Lee had surrendered, he gasped and exclaimed, “Oh no she didn’t!”
Just before his first inauguration, he told Mary Todd Lincoln to go home and take one thing off.
Lincoln grew his beard because he thought it looked hot on Ethan Hawke.
Upon entering Ford’s Theatre on that fateful night, Lincoln whispered to his wife, “I hear it’s slow.”
2
005
FIELD NOTES FROM ALL OVER
SUSAN ORLEAN
SHOW DOG
IF I were a bitch, I’d be in love with Biff Truesdale. Biff is perfect. He’s friendly, good-looking, rich, famous, and in excellent physical condition. He almost never drools. He’s not afraid of commitment. He wants children—actually, he already has children and wants a lot more. He works hard and is a consummate professional, but he also knows how to have fun.
What Biff likes most is food and sex. This makes him sound boorish, which he is not—he’s just elemental. Food he likes even better than sex. His favorite things to eat are cookies, mints, and hotel soap, but he will eat just about anything. Richard Krieger, a friend of Biff’s who occasionally drives him to appointments, said not long ago, “When we’re driving on I-95, we’ll usually pull over at McDonald’s. Even if Biff is napping, he always wakes up when we’re getting close. I get him a few plain hamburgers with buns—no ketchup, no mustard, and no pickles. He loves hamburgers. I don’t get him his own French fries, but if I get myself fries I always flip a few for him into the back.”
If you’re ever around Biff while you’re eating something he wants to taste—cold roast beef, a Wheatables cracker, chocolate, pasta, aspirin, whatever—he will stare at you across the pleated bridge of his nose and let his eyes sag and his lips tremble and allow a little bead of drool to percolate at the edge of his mouth until you feel so crummy that you give him some. This routine puts the people who know him in a quandary, because Biff has to watch his weight. Usually, he is as skinny as Kate Moss, but he can put on three pounds in an instant. The holidays can be tough. He takes time off at Christmas and spends it at home, in Attleboro, Massachusetts, where there’s a lot of food around and no pressure and no schedule and it’s easy to eat all day. The extra weight goes to his neck. Luckily, Biff likes working out. He runs for fifteen or twenty minutes twice a day, either outside or on his Jog-Master. When he’s feeling heavy, he runs longer, and skips snacks, until he’s back down to his ideal weight of seventy-five pounds.
Disquiet, Please! Page 46
