28 September
Andrea Doria:
Oh the evening I had last night! Curse local theatre and all its perpetrators! And curse me for getting myself into a position to make that statement.
As you know, Benny Sams and I bet annually on the Ryder Cup. As you may also be aware, the loser of the bet must submit to the whims of the winner. And, as has happened in six of the last seven years, I was on the losing end. As a result of past defeats, Sams has had me parade about town in a sandwich board inviting passers by to tweak my nose. He has also had me locked into the antique stocks that adorn the town square and one year had me spend a day working as a pump jockey at a "filling station." Humiliating as those turns were, the loser's punishment he dreamed up this year was the most nefarious and heinous of them all: he had me attend an evening of community theatre!!!
And not just any community theatre either. No, this was not a group of geriatrics butchering Eugene O'Neil or a herd of acne scarred youths giving the terminal treatment to "Midsummer Night's Dream" -- this was something far more insidious. There is a lady of sixty or so here in town bearing the name Melrose Kemp who considers herself something of a woman of the world. I mean this quite literally as she has circumnavigated the globe on six separate occasions. She also considers herself a writer and thespian. Here then is where these unfortunate considerations run confluent.
Much to the detriment of travel, theatre and common decency, Miss Kemp has mounted a one-woman show in which she attempts to "bring alive" one of these round-the-world journeys of hers, this one having taken place in 1959. (Although at one point in the proceedings she waxed sentimental about the speed of the mighty Concorde. So this, along with her scores of muffed lines, leads me to guess there is a good deal of confusion running rampant in her memory department). Using her own slides as a backdrop (flashed onto a scrim in an almost random way by a scrawny lad from the local AV club), she went on for a full three hours with her "pithy" observations about foreign customs and the travails of a woman who, as she put it at one point, "was woman enough to travel alone."
I suppose in the hands of somebody else this might been somewhat interesting, but Miss Kemp was nowhere near the task. Her voice is high yet somehow markedly unfeminine. She removed any action from the evening by choosing to sit on a steamer trunk bearing her name, presumably an original "prop" from the actual trip. She drank lots of water, especially when describing the hotter climbs to which she journeyed, which resulted in no less than seven unscheduled intermissions.
Perhaps her greatest malfeasance was her insistence on using a variety of poorly executed accents when quoting the natives of the countries who had the misfortune to call her a guest. "You rike soup Missus Rady?" she said during her Japanese sojourn; which, I heard because she announced her arrival in that country by slamming a giant gong, rousing me and the five other unlucky fools caught there for the night from our respective slumbers. In Italy a man complimented her on her camera thusly: "That'sa nice-a Kodaka." Her travels around Rome also elicited this bit of dialogue: "I had been warned that the men of Italy would pinch a woman at every opportunity but I found them to be perfect gentlemen and was not touched in any way." I almost forsook decorum and shouted out: "The eye-ties are pigs but they're not blind pigs!" but dozed again before the words could escape my mouth.
By the middle of the third act (or eighth if one reconfigured to account for all of the breaks) I yawned so strenuously that I -- and I can document this with paper--cracked my jaw in three places! Miss Kemp was clearing customs at Heathrow for her final flight to the States ("'ave a loverly flight, ma'lady") as I fainted straight away from the pain my deluxe yawn had caused me. I did not fall to the floor as Sams had chained me to the seat so that I could not welch on our bet. Also, as a precaution against a sudden burst of Houdinism on my part, he watched the door form the safety of his car for the entire duration of the play. I awakened moments later to an empty stage and auditorium (emptier might be a better phrase in the case of the latter) with his grinning visage looking down at me. "Now that's entertainment!" he yelled, clapping me on the shoulder. Had I a gun I would have shot him.
I believe the lesson I have learned is this: if one must gamble, one should do it for money only.
Yours,
Chevy Maddox Chevy
Letter the Previous /
Letter the Next
|
|