MAGGIE: I guess that kid’ll be born one of these days, right?
HILDA: Continue working on my études no matter what they say.
MAGGIE: That’s admirable I think.
HILDA: The thing is not to let your spirit be conquered.
MAGGIE: I guess that kid’ll be born after a while, right?
HILDA: I guess so. Those boogers are really gonna keep me out of there, you know that?
MAGGIE: Their minds are inflexible and rigid.
HILDA: Probably because I’m a poor pregnant woman don’t you think?
MAGGIE: You said you didn’t tell them.
HILDA: But maybe they’re very shrewd psychologists and they could just look at my face and tell.
MAGGIE: No it doesn’t show yet how many months are you?
HILDA: Two and a half just about you can tell when I take off my clothes.
MAGGIE: You didn’t take your clothes off did you?
HILDA: No I was wearing you know what the students wear. Jeans and a serape. I carried a green book bag.
MAGGIE: Jam-packed with études.
HILDA: Yes. He asked where I had gotten my previous training and I told him.
MAGGIE: Oh boy I remember when it was flat, flat as the deck of something, a boat or a ship.
HILDA: You’re not important, they told me.
MAGGIE: Oh sweetie I am so sorry for you.
HILDA: We parted. Then I walked through the gorgeous Conservatory light into the foyer and then through the great black ironwork Conservatory doors.
MAGGIE: I was a face on the other side of the glass.
HILDA: My aspect as I departed most dignified and serene.
MAGGIE: Time heals everything.
HILDA: No it doesn’t.
MAGGIE (shouted): Cut lip fat lip puffed lip split lip!
HILDA (shouted): Haw! haw! haw! haw!
MAGGIE: Well Hilda there are other things in life.
HILDA: Yes Maggie I suppose there are. None that I want.
MAGGIE: Non-Conservatory people have their own lives. We Conservatory people don’t have much to do with them but we are told they have their own lives.
HILDA: I suppose I could file an appeal if there’s anywhere to file an appeal to. If there’s anywhere.
MAGGIE: That’s an idea we get stacks of appeals, stacks and stacks.
HILDA: I’ll wait forever. Night after night after night.
MAGGIE: I’ll sit with you. I’ll help you formulate the words. What do you want to say?
HILDA: I want to say my whole life depends on it. Something like that.
MAGGIE: It’s against the rules for Conservatory people to help non-Conservatory people you know that.
HILDA: Well goddammit I thought you were going to help me.
MAGGIE: OK. I’ll help you. What do you want to say?
HILDA: I want to say my whole life depends on it. Something like that.
MAGGIE (elegiac): We got man naked models and woman naked models, harps, giant potted plants, and drapes. There are hierarchies, some people higher up and others lower down. These mingle, in the gorgeous light. We have lots of fun. There’s lots of green furniture you know with paint on it. Worn green paint. Gilt lines one-quarter inch from the edges. Worn green lines.
HILDA: And probably flambeaux in little niches in the walls, right?
MAGGIE: Yeah we got flambeaux. Who’s the father?
HILDA: Guy named Robert.
MAGGIE: Did you have a good time?
HILDA: The affair ran the usual course. Fever, boredom, trapped.
MAGGIE: Hot, rinse, spin dry.
HILDA: Is it wonderful in there Maggie?
MAGGIE: I have to say it is. Yes. It is.
HILDA: Do you feel great, being there? Do you feel wonderful?
MAGGIE: Yes, it feels pretty good. Very often there is, upon the dinner tray, a rose.
HILDA: I will never be admitted to the Conservatory.
MAGGIE: You will never be admitted to the Conservatory.
HILDA: How do I look?
MAGGIE: OK. Not bad. Fine.
HILDA: I will never get there. How do I look?
MAGGIE: Fine. Great. Time heals everything Hilda.
HILDA: No it doesn’t.
MAGGIE: Time heals everything.
HILDA: No it doesn’t. How do I look?
MAGGIE: Old.
(Sound: Silence; two seconds)
MAGGIE: If you need a friend I’m yours till the end. (Pause) Julia’s is the best. Best I’ve ever seen. The finest.
HILDA: The muscle of jealousy is not in me. Nowhere.
MAGGIE: Oh it is so fine. Incomparable.
HILDA: Some think one thing, some another.
MAGGIE: The very damn best believe me.
HILDA: Well I don’t know, I haven’t seen it.
MAGGIE: Well, would you like to see it?
HILDA: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know her very well do you?
HILDA: Well, I know her well enough to ask her.
HILDA: Well, why don’t you ask her if it’s not an inconvenience or this isn’t the wrong time or something?
MAGGIE: Well, probably this is the wrong time come to think of it because she isn’t here and sometime when she is here would probably be a better time.
HILDA: Well, I would like to see it right now because just talking about it has got me in the mood to see it. If you know what I mean.
MAGGIE: She told me she didn’t like to be called just for that purpose, people she didn’t know and maybe wouldn’t like if she did know, I’m just warning you.
HILDA: Oh.
MAGGIE: You see.
HILDA: Yes.
(Sound: Motorcycle revving engine; six seconds)
MAGGIE: I could have done better. But I don’t know how. Could have done better, cleaned better or cooked better or I don’t know. Better.
HILDA: You smile. And the angels sing.
MAGGIE: Blew it, blew it. Had a clown at the wedding, he officiated standing there in his voluptuous white costume his drum and trumpet at his feet. He said, “Do you, Harry. . .” and all that. The guests applauded, the clown band played, it was a brilliant occasion.
HILDA: Our many moons of patience and accommodation. Tricks and stunts unknown to common cunts.
MAGGIE: The guests applauded. Above us, a great tent with red and yellow stripes.
HILDA: The unexploded pillow and the simple, blunt sheet.
MAGGIE: I was fecund, savagely so.
HILDA: Painting dead women by the hundreds in passionate imitation of Delacroix.
MAGGIE: Sailing after lunch and after sailing, gin.
HILDA: Pleasures of a summer’s day.
MAGGIE: Do not go into the red barn, he said. I went into the red barn. Julia. Swinging on a rope from hayloft to tack room. Gazed at by horses with their large, accenting eyes. They somehow looked as if they knew.
HILDA: You packed hastily reaching the station just before midnight counting the pennies in your purse.
MAGGIE: Yes. Regaining the city, plunged once more into activities.
HILDA: You’ve got to have something besides yourself. A cause, interest, or goal.
MAGGIE: Made myself knowledgeable in certain areas, one, two, three, four. Studied the Value Line and dipped into cocoa.
HILDA: The kind of thing you do so well.
MAGGIE: Acquired busts of certain notables, marble, silver, bronze. The Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
HILDA: Wailed a bit into the ears of friends and caverns of the telephone.
MAGGIE: But I rallied. Rallied.
HILDA: Made an effort. Made the effort.
MAGGIE: To make soft what is hard. To make hard the soft. To conceal what is black with use, under new paint. Check the tomatoes with their red times, in the manual. To enspirit the spiritless. To get me a jug and go out behind the barn, sharing with whoever is out behind the bam, pleasant or noble.
HILDA: Sometimes I have luck. In
plazas or taverns.
MAGGIE: Right as rain. I mean okey-dokey.
HILDA: Unless the participant affirmatively elects otherwise.
MAGGIE: What does that mean?
HILDA: Damfino. Just a bit of legal language I picked up somewhere.
(Sound: Motorcycle revving engine as before)
MAGGIE: You are the sunshine of my life.
HILDA: Toys toys I want more toys.
MAGGIE: Yes, I should think you would.
HILDA: That wallow in certainty called the love affair.
MAGGIE: The fading gray velvet of the sofa. He clowned with my panties in his teeth. Walked around that way for half an hour.
HILDA: What’s this gunk here in this bucket?
MAGGIE: Bread in milk, have some.
HILDA: I think I could eat a little something.
MAGGIE: A mistletoe salad we whipped up together.
HILDA: Stick to it, keep after it, only way to go is all the way.
MAGGIE: Want to buy a garter belt? Have one, thanks. Cut your losses, try another town, split for the tall timber.
HILDA: Well it’s a clean afternoon, heavy on the azaleas.
MAGGIE: Yes they pride themselves on their azaleas. Have competitions, cups.
HILDA: I dashed a hope and dimmed an ardor. Promises shimmering like shrimp in light just under the surface of the water.
MAGGIE: Peered into his dental arcade noting the health of his pink tissue.
HILDA: Backed into a small table which overturned with a scattering of ashtrays and back copies of important journals.
(Sound: Landslide as before)
MAGGIE: What ought I to do? What do you advise me? Should I try to see him? What will happen? Can you tell me?
HILDA: Yes it’s caring and being kind. We have corn dodgers too and blood sausage.
MAGGIE: Lasciviously offered him a something pure and white.
HILDA: But he hastily with an embarrassed schottische of the hands covered you up again.
HILDA: Much like that. Every day. I don’t mind doing the work if I get the results. (Pause) We had a dog because we thought it would keep us together. A plain dog.
(Sound: Fragment of chamber music as before)
HILDA: Did it?
MAGGIE: Naw it was just another of those dumb ideas we had we thought would keep us together.
HILDA: Bone ignorance.
MAGGIE: Saw him once more, he was at a meeting I was at, had developed an annoying habit of coughing into his coat collar whenever he—
HILDA: Coughed.
MAGGIE: Yes he’d lift his coat collar and cough into it odd mannerism very annoying.
(Sound: Bass fiddle notes as before)
MAGGIE: Then the candles going out one by one—
(Sound: Bass fiddle)
HILDA: The last candle hidden behind the altar—
(Sound: Bass fiddle)
MAGGIE: The tabernacle door ajar—
(Sound: Bass fiddle)
HILDA: The clapping shut of the book.
(Sound: Door slamming as before; four-second silence)
MAGGIE (slowly): I got ready for the great day. The great day came, (pause) several times in fact.
HILDA: Each time with memories of the last time.
MAGGIE: No. These do not in fact intrude. Maybe as a slight shimmer of the over-and-done-with. Each great day is itself, with its own war machines, rattles, and green lords. There is the hesitation that the particular day won’t be what it is meant to be. Mostly it is. That’s peculiar.
HILDA: Well it’s a clean afternoon, heavy on the azaleas.
MAGGIE: He told me terrible things in the evening of that day as we sat side by side holding hands waiting for the rain to wash his watercolor paper clean. Waiting for the rain to wash the watercolors from his watercolor paper.
HILDA: About me?
MAGGIE: Oh, everything.
(Sound: Theme)
SNOW WHITE
ACT ONE
SCENE ONE
(Lights come up on platform, raised very high, SNOW WHITE is seated, right, and her hair is dangling down. Her hair has been augmented so that it is immensely long, falling almost all the way to the stage, BILL enters, left, sees the hair, and stops short.)
BILL: Well, that certainly is a lot of hair hanging there. (Pause) And it seems to be hanging from our windows, too. I mean, those windows are in our house, surely? (Pause) Now who amongst us has that much hair, black as ebony? (Pause) I am only pretending to ask myself this question. The distasteful answer is already known to me, as is the significance of this act, this hanging. As well as the sexual meaning of hair itself. (Pause) There can be only one answer. It is Snow White. It is Snow White who has taken this step, the meaning of which is clear to all of us. All seven of us know what this means. It means she seeks a new lover.
(DAN enters, right, sees the hair, stops short, and immediately begins lecturing.)
DAN: Now you’re probably familiar with the fact that the per capita production of trash in this country is up from 2.75 pounds per day in 1920 (pause) to 4.5 pounds per day in 1973, the last year for which we have a figure, and is increasing at the rate of about four percent a year—
(The other MEN enter, in a crowd, from the opposite side of the stage. They stand directly in front of SNOW WHITE’S hair, holding a debate.)
EDWARD (solemn): To be a horsewife. That, my friends, is my text for today. This important slot in our society, conceptualized by God as very nearly the key to the whole thing, has suffered in recent months and in this house, a degree of denigration. I have heard it; I have been saddened by it. So I want today, if I can, (pause) to dispel some of these wrong ideas that have been going around, causing confusion and scumming up the face of the truth.
DAN (impatient): —increasing at the rate of four percent a year. Now that rate will probably go up, because it’s been going up, and I hazard that we may very well soon reach a point where it’s 100 percent. Now at such a point, you will agree, things turn from a question of disposing of this “trash” to a question of appreciating its qualities. Because, after all, it’s 100 percent, right? And there can no longer be any question of disposing of it, because it’s all there is—
EDWARD: The horsewife! The very basebone of the American plethora! The horsewife! Without whom the entire structure of civilian life would crumble! Without whom our whole existence would be reduced, in a twinkling, to that brute level of brutality for which we so rightly reproach the filthy animals! Without the horsewife, we would still be going around dressed in skins probably, with no big-ticket items—washer-dryers, dryer-washers, microwave washer-dryer-cookers—to fill the empty voids, in our homes and in our hearts. (Pause) Now I ask you, gentlemen, what do we have here? Do we have a being which regards herself with the appropriate self-respect? No. No, we do not. We have here, rather, a being which regards itself with something dangerously close to self-hatred. That is the problem. What is the solution?
DAN (persuasive): So that’s why we should get into plastic . . . buffalo . . . humps! (Pause; DAN becomes almost poetic, a prophet) They are “trash,” and what in fact could be more useless or trashlike? Plastic buffalo humps! It’s that we must be on the leading edge of the trash phenomenon, the troubled face of the future, in my view. And as you know (very serious), the future belongs to those who prepare for it!
EDWARD (pursuing his own line): A being which regards herself with something dangerously close to self-hatred!
HENRY: I could cut your gizzard out, Edward! You are making the whole damned thing more difficult than it has to be. I put it to you that, without your screen of difficulty-making pseudoproblems, the whole damned thing can be resolved, very neatly, in the following way.
EDWARD: Wrong. Wrong.
HENRY: Now, what do we apprehend when we apprehend Snow White? We apprehend, first, two three-quarter-scale breasts floating toward us wrapped, typically, in a red towel. Or, if we are apprehending her from the other direction, we apprehend a be
autiful snow-white arse floating away from us, wrapped, typically, in a red towel. Now, I ask you: what, in these two quite distinct apprehensions, is the constant? The factor that remains the same? Why, simply, the red towel. I submit that, rightly understood, the problem of Snow White has to do with nothing else than red towels. So we can, if we wish, get rid of Snow White. And I have here in this brown bag . . . I have taken the liberty of purchasing (hands out red towels) here, Hubert, here is your towel. . . Kevin . . . Clem . . . Edward . . .
EDWARD: I don’t want a ratty old red towel. I want the beautiful snow-white arse itself!
(Lights up on SNOW WHITE)
SNOW WHITE: Which princeI Which prince will come? Will it be Prince Albert? Prince Philip? Prince Charlie? Prince Akihito? Prince Rainier? Prince Rupert? Prince Hal? Prince George? Prince Valiant? Prince Paul? Well, it is terrific to be anticipating a prince—to be waiting and knowing that what you are waiting for is a prince, packed with grace—but it is still waiting, and waiting as a mode of existence is a darksome mode. I would rather be doing a hundred other things. I wonder if he will have the Hapsburg lip?
(PAUL enters from the audience or whatever—care must be taken to differentiate him from the seven men with whom SNOW WHITE lives.)
PAUL (dreamily): I would retract the green sea, and the brown fish in it, and I would especially retract that long black hair hanging from that window that I encountered today, on my way home from the Unemployment Office. It makes me terribly nervous, that hair. It was beautiful, I admit it. Long black hair of such texture, fineness, is not easily come by. Hair black as ebony! Yet it makes me terribly nervous. Why some innocent person might come along, and see it, and conceive it his duty to climb up, and discern the reason it is being hung out of that window. There is probably some girl attached to it at the top, and with her, responsibilities of various sorts . . . teeth . . . piano lessons. . . .
(All exit except KEVIN and BILL)
KEVIN: Bill. . .
BILL: Yes?
KEVIN: Maybe I shouldn’t ask you this . . .
BILL: What?
KEVIN: Are you . . . all right?
BILL: No.
KEVIN: Is there anything I can do?
BILL: No.
The Teachings of Don B. Page 24
