They took their cause more seriously than did the playwright.They took their cause more seriously than did the playwright. They felt betrayed. They left during the intermission to invest in vegetables and poultry products. The play closed during the early moments of the second act. The theater owner had to replace the curtains. Anyway, the playwright was notorious: you can imagine the joy he brought to newspaper columnists, editors, and critics. They agreed unanimously that the play should reopen, but no theater owner would touch it. There wasn't a person within a hundred miles that didn't know the story. EVERYBODY knew. Even so, when I was introduced to him by a nice old midwestern biddy, a scion of the Indianapolis cultural scene, she says, "He's single, you know..." with a significant look that was supposed to tell the Whole Story: "single" equals gay when said in the right tone of voice and with the eyebrows in the correct position. This is the sort of linguistic semaphore code that midwesterners understand perfectly. It allows them to communicate with the Deep South, for example, and to translate for New Yorkers. And if you think the old biddy lives in La-La Land, don't you believe it. She bought IBM stock for peanuts as a teen-age girl and thinks New Yorkers are overly dependent on reality anyway. She has homes in Miami, New York, and Indianapolis. So J and I had absolutely no problem understanding each other, even though not a single bodily function or anatomical feature was mentioned. Anyway, our little exchange made it pretty clear what the choices were: I could prepare myself for what was to come or not, but it was finally going to happen. I only had control over the level of hygiene and nothing else. So I prepared myself. J says I have to include this in the account, so I'll put it in, but I will try to describe this a deli- cately as possible. We're talking about colonic irrigation, here, folks. Several repeats of the procedure were necessary until I was voiding clear, clean water. Then another just to be sure. This is more than would be required by an examining physician, but then we weren't just looking, were we? I wanted to be clean. For me as well as for J. Enough said, especially for someone from the midwest. As, I've already mentioned, my mother, the archetypic midwesterner, doesn't have any bodily functions at all, as far as I can tell. |