It’s eight at night, and I’m sleeping off a very heavy dinner eaten two hours earlier near Columbia University. I’m dreaming of – something, when someone knocks on the door.
Of course, whoever is at the door will not go away, so five minutes later, extremely groggy and irritated, I open the door to find one of my floormates standing outside.
“Do you have any eggs hidden anywhere that we can use?” he asks. “We need it for a party.”
I think it is probably significant that I do not even ask questions like ‘why’ anymore.
Half an hour later, I’m helping make stacks of French toast. Did you know that French toast apparently goes as well with soft drinks as with vodka?
Another hour later, I’m standing with my floormates outside one of the dorms in the North Tower of my residence hall, each of us holding a plate of French toast.
We are being told by an extremely apologetic student that the party has been unfortunately cancelled.
Apparently, a Residence Assistant had been informed that the party was going to involve alcohol, and so had been forced to step in.
On paper, you see, NYU policy forbids underage drinking.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I haven’t seen Resident Assistants themselves at some of these parties. Or residence hall security guards who ignore students blatantly traipsing in with alcohol bottles. Or the school paper reporting on beer pong parties.
An average NYU student consumes so much alcohol that a galang guni collecting bottles from NYU dorms could probably make it onto the Forbes list of richest people in the world.
But this, of course, hasn’t stopped NYU from occasionally breaking up parties.
When Residence Assistants have to do so, they usually say that it is because of the noise the party is generating and the disruption the party is causing other people.
They say this because stopping a party because of its alcoholic content is so laughable as to be ridiculous.
But everyone knows it’s about the alcohol, and so everyone laughs anyway.
So my floormates and I are standing here with our French toast, listening to the extremely apologetic student, and all of us are smiling at the silliness of the occasionally alcoholophobic administration.
The next day, of course, some people will say that the party self-destructed because too few people showed up. Maybe this is true.
When different people tell you different things, it can get pretty confusing.
But if you look at NYU’s precedent, and think about why different people are saying different things instead of working together, it can also get pretty depressing very quickly.
And meanwhile, plates of French toast go wasted, organizers and participants get annoyed, and the next time someone asks me to make French toast for a party I know I personally will be very very wary about wasting my eggs.
Is this what everybody really wants?
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Play: Disembowelment
You like that steak? Not too rare? I usually get it rare and sometimes they get it too bloody. No? It’s okay? Okay then.
You want some wine to go with that, there’s some in the mini-bar. Wine makes steaks go down better, red wine, I think. My ex-wife and I took a wine course once, she was always into that self-improvement bullshit. Me, I was fine with beer.
No, no, I don’t want any. I – had a small drinking problem a few years ago, so it’s just water now. Steak and water.
I don’t usually do this, you know, but you looked so hungry out there in the cold, and – you don’t mind me shooting off, do you? No, that’s right, you eat, I talk, that sounds ‘bout right.
I could tell when I saw you, you know. That you’re a good listener. You got that ‘do your own time’ look. What? Yeah, it’s a prison thing, but don’t worry, I didn’t serve. I worked in the big house up in Texas once upon a time. Worked in the V.P. – vulnerable prisoners unit – the wife used to get a kick out of that, when she still found the blue suit sexy. (smiles) She wasn’t too good for handcuffs too, I’ll tell you that. But vulnerable prisoners, she thought that was a – whatcha-call-it – redundancy. “A redundancy in terms.” She could be a real bleeding heart sometimes. I could never tell her that the V.P.s are the bughouse crazy ones.
No, not doing that anymore. Hung up the blue suit and gave back the big stick about – what is it – yeah, ‘bout two years already. Now I’m in sales, travel round going to conferences in tux and tie, like, how crazy is that, right?
Fuck… two years. Can’t believe it’s been so long since – well, never mind ‘bout that.
(he broods for a moment)
It’s not that I hate this job, you know. I get to travel, go to fancy hotels, expense hookers. Tax-free fucking in big hotel beds.
But it’s boring shit, you know. The steaks and the hookers and the fucking products. I could roll off the fucking products for you by heart now, all 132 of them, fucking products and their S/N codes.
(he shakes his head in disgust, and then looks up)
You don’t mind me f-bombing, right? My wife hated it, said it was – uncouth. Unrefined. She was a real bitch sometimes, especially at the end. But we were happy once, you know. In the beginning. She liked that I worked in a prison, thought I was bettering society. I liked her too; she was a hotshot therapist, and she wasn’t just good at talking, you know what I’m saying?
(he smiles)
She could be such a cheerleader sometimes. But that was before she got all bughouse. Said I liked my job too much, wouldn’t you know. One second I’m saving the world a prisoner at a time, the next I’m some batshit crazy guy who gets off on suffering. She never got it, you know. She just never got it.
(he wait for a reaction, and is satisfied)
I’m glad you agree with me. You look like the sort of person who don’t mind blood and dirt, if you don’t mind me saying. (beat) You want another steak? I can getcha another one, might wanna get one for myself too. No?
But that’s all over for me now, you know. Now it’s this sales shit. Can’t get used to it – You know what they say; you never really get out of prison.
(he pauses)
Why did I quit then? (beat) I didn’t. I’d go back to the big house in a snap, but they won’t take me back.
Why?
No, it’s nothing like that. What do you think we are? It’s nothing like that. Me and five others, we were just – unlucky, you know. Two years ago something bad happened, we saw it, and they took us off, those who didn’t quit. ‘Shock And Extreme Trauma’, I still remember, is what the psych called it. Fucking trash-talk, basically.
You sure you wanna hear this? It’s pretty graphic.
Okay. So they called us to go to one of the cells, ‘assistance’ they called it, and they didn’t tell us anything more, so we knew it was gonna be bad, right. So I took this new kid, Evans, and two more officers, Hunt and Williams, and we went down with our sticks, you know.
And when we got there, the two officers already there were standing outside the cell. They wouldn’t go in cause it was blood everywhere, see. Floor, walls, bed literally dripping with blood. One of the cellies, Ricketts, strangled his bunkie and opened him up with a shank, see. Belly button to Adam’s apple. The sick bastard pulled out the liver and intestines, gave his bunkie a fucking lobotomy. So the stuff’s lying everywhere, there’s an eyeball on the locker, and another eyeball on the floor all stepped on and ground to bits, and the sick bastard’s standing at the back of the cell, holding his fucking bunkie’s heart, saying he’s gonna eat it and no-one can stop him. It was – it was…
(he shakes his head)
So Evans is puking everywhere, right, and nobody’s moving, and fucking Ricketts is there chewing on the goddamn heart, slurping it up, in goddamned fact, but we gotta follow protocol, right. So I went in, dragged Hunt in to cuff Ricketts, and I –
I gave Scofield – that was the bunkie’s name – I gave Scofield mouth-to-mouth. The fucker’s obviously dead, lying there with his insides on the outside, but you gotta follow the book, and the others – well.
So that was that.
You have the same look that my ex had. But that’s the worst part, I promise you.
So afterwards they made us all take psych sessions. Evans quit immediately, don’t blame the kid. It was a sick piece of shit. Godbear, Abrams, and Hunt didn’t last much longer either. So me and Williams, we stuck it out a bit longer, then Williams left too. Said he couldn’t eat meat without puking. Then it was just me, and then the psych wrote a report, said I was repressing ‘Shock And Extreme Trauma’, so they took me off too. Wrote each of us a big fat check afterwards. I got 500,000 big ones.
Then Rachel – my ex – left, said she couldn’t stand it, couldn’t even stand the thought of it, and she wasn’t even there.
(he pauses)
But like I said, I’d go back to the big house in a snap, I really would.
Why the fuck would I do that?
It’s just – how the fuck should I put this… It’s just – in the big house you have to keep sharp, you know? You have to deal with the rats, the rabbits, and the big bitches – that’s those doing life – they always have a shank somewhere for someone. Then you gotta deal with the new boots, pencil whip the convict bosses to keep ‘em in line, keep a finger on who’s riding with who, make sure the blickey doesn’t get out of hand, and all the while you gotta know when to keep your fucking nose out of gangs taking it to the square. You gotta – Grab The Danger, I don’t know, and when you can do all that, you feel –
(he pauses)
Yeah. Kinda like being a hobo. Kinda. (beat) And dying – people get shanked all the time. Sick shit goes down. Just – sick shit goes down, you know what I mean? And you gotta have people who are – not strong, but – people who won’t crack, you know? And you, and you can’t get – whatcha-call-it – desensitized too. Everyone gets desensitized, but desensitized gets you killed in a prison. Desensitized gets you killed in a war. That’s why I always told the wife that if you’re working in the V.P. you gotta – not love it – but you gotta – stay sharp. Take pride in your work, I guess some people say.
So I told her, Rach, baby, you keep talking, and you keep trying to stop all the bad stuff from happening, and when you get rid of all the rapists and murderers and the people who fuck 18 month-old babies and the people who chop up bodies and throw them into different cans round the state, you stop that, then I’ll stop too.
But until then, I told her, if I tell you I feel – I felt – alive – every day I spent in the V.P., don’t fucking stare at me like I’m crazy, I told her. Because you need people like me to keep your prisons, fight your wars – pull the heads off your chickens and slice the throats of your pigs. It’s people like us who keep doing while you keep talking, I told her. But she never got it. Even at the end. She kept crying, said she was Crying For My Humanity, wouldn’t you know it. She didn’t get it…
I Was More Human Than She Was. She was happy just – surviving. Talking. Fucking. She never saw – everything came to her in words, memories, nice products with labels. Repression. Guilt. Anger. Rage. Fear. But there are – you see a guy keestering a shank because he’s so scared out of his fucking mind, you hear fishes screaming after they’ve spent five days in the hole, or you step on an eyeball smashed to bits – after that you just – there are just – just some things that are – bigger, bigger than fucking words, you know what I’m saying? Even – hunger, or desperation – I get that, I’ve seen it, I don’t – I wouldn’t blame them…
(he looks down, and then looks up again, almost a challenge)
Well. They’re just such fucking huge things for such tiny words, but she never got that. Sometimes she was just a real mensch in her tailored Guccis. But I get it.
(he pauses)
And I did, you know. Feel alive. Like I was connected to something deep. I was the very best of the blue suits, rarely got red on me, but you know, guess I was lucky. But that’s all over now. Now it’s this – this pussy product-pushing. Getting fat and punchy. Sometimes I want – sometimes I think even a mugger could take me, you know?
(he looks away from the listener, but again nothing happens. He looks back)
I see. “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper”, huh.
(a beat)
I think I will have one of those steaks. I’m gonna order up another rare one. You sure you don’t want one too?
You want some wine to go with that, there’s some in the mini-bar. Wine makes steaks go down better, red wine, I think. My ex-wife and I took a wine course once, she was always into that self-improvement bullshit. Me, I was fine with beer.
No, no, I don’t want any. I – had a small drinking problem a few years ago, so it’s just water now. Steak and water.
I don’t usually do this, you know, but you looked so hungry out there in the cold, and – you don’t mind me shooting off, do you? No, that’s right, you eat, I talk, that sounds ‘bout right.
I could tell when I saw you, you know. That you’re a good listener. You got that ‘do your own time’ look. What? Yeah, it’s a prison thing, but don’t worry, I didn’t serve. I worked in the big house up in Texas once upon a time. Worked in the V.P. – vulnerable prisoners unit – the wife used to get a kick out of that, when she still found the blue suit sexy. (smiles) She wasn’t too good for handcuffs too, I’ll tell you that. But vulnerable prisoners, she thought that was a – whatcha-call-it – redundancy. “A redundancy in terms.” She could be a real bleeding heart sometimes. I could never tell her that the V.P.s are the bughouse crazy ones.
No, not doing that anymore. Hung up the blue suit and gave back the big stick about – what is it – yeah, ‘bout two years already. Now I’m in sales, travel round going to conferences in tux and tie, like, how crazy is that, right?
Fuck… two years. Can’t believe it’s been so long since – well, never mind ‘bout that.
(he broods for a moment)
It’s not that I hate this job, you know. I get to travel, go to fancy hotels, expense hookers. Tax-free fucking in big hotel beds.
But it’s boring shit, you know. The steaks and the hookers and the fucking products. I could roll off the fucking products for you by heart now, all 132 of them, fucking products and their S/N codes.
(he shakes his head in disgust, and then looks up)
You don’t mind me f-bombing, right? My wife hated it, said it was – uncouth. Unrefined. She was a real bitch sometimes, especially at the end. But we were happy once, you know. In the beginning. She liked that I worked in a prison, thought I was bettering society. I liked her too; she was a hotshot therapist, and she wasn’t just good at talking, you know what I’m saying?
(he smiles)
She could be such a cheerleader sometimes. But that was before she got all bughouse. Said I liked my job too much, wouldn’t you know. One second I’m saving the world a prisoner at a time, the next I’m some batshit crazy guy who gets off on suffering. She never got it, you know. She just never got it.
(he wait for a reaction, and is satisfied)
I’m glad you agree with me. You look like the sort of person who don’t mind blood and dirt, if you don’t mind me saying. (beat) You want another steak? I can getcha another one, might wanna get one for myself too. No?
But that’s all over for me now, you know. Now it’s this sales shit. Can’t get used to it – You know what they say; you never really get out of prison.
(he pauses)
Why did I quit then? (beat) I didn’t. I’d go back to the big house in a snap, but they won’t take me back.
Why?
No, it’s nothing like that. What do you think we are? It’s nothing like that. Me and five others, we were just – unlucky, you know. Two years ago something bad happened, we saw it, and they took us off, those who didn’t quit. ‘Shock And Extreme Trauma’, I still remember, is what the psych called it. Fucking trash-talk, basically.
You sure you wanna hear this? It’s pretty graphic.
Okay. So they called us to go to one of the cells, ‘assistance’ they called it, and they didn’t tell us anything more, so we knew it was gonna be bad, right. So I took this new kid, Evans, and two more officers, Hunt and Williams, and we went down with our sticks, you know.
And when we got there, the two officers already there were standing outside the cell. They wouldn’t go in cause it was blood everywhere, see. Floor, walls, bed literally dripping with blood. One of the cellies, Ricketts, strangled his bunkie and opened him up with a shank, see. Belly button to Adam’s apple. The sick bastard pulled out the liver and intestines, gave his bunkie a fucking lobotomy. So the stuff’s lying everywhere, there’s an eyeball on the locker, and another eyeball on the floor all stepped on and ground to bits, and the sick bastard’s standing at the back of the cell, holding his fucking bunkie’s heart, saying he’s gonna eat it and no-one can stop him. It was – it was…
(he shakes his head)
So Evans is puking everywhere, right, and nobody’s moving, and fucking Ricketts is there chewing on the goddamn heart, slurping it up, in goddamned fact, but we gotta follow protocol, right. So I went in, dragged Hunt in to cuff Ricketts, and I –
I gave Scofield – that was the bunkie’s name – I gave Scofield mouth-to-mouth. The fucker’s obviously dead, lying there with his insides on the outside, but you gotta follow the book, and the others – well.
So that was that.
You have the same look that my ex had. But that’s the worst part, I promise you.
So afterwards they made us all take psych sessions. Evans quit immediately, don’t blame the kid. It was a sick piece of shit. Godbear, Abrams, and Hunt didn’t last much longer either. So me and Williams, we stuck it out a bit longer, then Williams left too. Said he couldn’t eat meat without puking. Then it was just me, and then the psych wrote a report, said I was repressing ‘Shock And Extreme Trauma’, so they took me off too. Wrote each of us a big fat check afterwards. I got 500,000 big ones.
Then Rachel – my ex – left, said she couldn’t stand it, couldn’t even stand the thought of it, and she wasn’t even there.
(he pauses)
But like I said, I’d go back to the big house in a snap, I really would.
Why the fuck would I do that?
It’s just – how the fuck should I put this… It’s just – in the big house you have to keep sharp, you know? You have to deal with the rats, the rabbits, and the big bitches – that’s those doing life – they always have a shank somewhere for someone. Then you gotta deal with the new boots, pencil whip the convict bosses to keep ‘em in line, keep a finger on who’s riding with who, make sure the blickey doesn’t get out of hand, and all the while you gotta know when to keep your fucking nose out of gangs taking it to the square. You gotta – Grab The Danger, I don’t know, and when you can do all that, you feel –
(he pauses)
Yeah. Kinda like being a hobo. Kinda. (beat) And dying – people get shanked all the time. Sick shit goes down. Just – sick shit goes down, you know what I mean? And you gotta have people who are – not strong, but – people who won’t crack, you know? And you, and you can’t get – whatcha-call-it – desensitized too. Everyone gets desensitized, but desensitized gets you killed in a prison. Desensitized gets you killed in a war. That’s why I always told the wife that if you’re working in the V.P. you gotta – not love it – but you gotta – stay sharp. Take pride in your work, I guess some people say.
So I told her, Rach, baby, you keep talking, and you keep trying to stop all the bad stuff from happening, and when you get rid of all the rapists and murderers and the people who fuck 18 month-old babies and the people who chop up bodies and throw them into different cans round the state, you stop that, then I’ll stop too.
But until then, I told her, if I tell you I feel – I felt – alive – every day I spent in the V.P., don’t fucking stare at me like I’m crazy, I told her. Because you need people like me to keep your prisons, fight your wars – pull the heads off your chickens and slice the throats of your pigs. It’s people like us who keep doing while you keep talking, I told her. But she never got it. Even at the end. She kept crying, said she was Crying For My Humanity, wouldn’t you know it. She didn’t get it…
I Was More Human Than She Was. She was happy just – surviving. Talking. Fucking. She never saw – everything came to her in words, memories, nice products with labels. Repression. Guilt. Anger. Rage. Fear. But there are – you see a guy keestering a shank because he’s so scared out of his fucking mind, you hear fishes screaming after they’ve spent five days in the hole, or you step on an eyeball smashed to bits – after that you just – there are just – just some things that are – bigger, bigger than fucking words, you know what I’m saying? Even – hunger, or desperation – I get that, I’ve seen it, I don’t – I wouldn’t blame them…
(he looks down, and then looks up again, almost a challenge)
Well. They’re just such fucking huge things for such tiny words, but she never got that. Sometimes she was just a real mensch in her tailored Guccis. But I get it.
(he pauses)
And I did, you know. Feel alive. Like I was connected to something deep. I was the very best of the blue suits, rarely got red on me, but you know, guess I was lucky. But that’s all over now. Now it’s this – this pussy product-pushing. Getting fat and punchy. Sometimes I want – sometimes I think even a mugger could take me, you know?
(he looks away from the listener, but again nothing happens. He looks back)
I see. “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper”, huh.
(a beat)
I think I will have one of those steaks. I’m gonna order up another rare one. You sure you don’t want one too?
Monday, March 06, 2006
The New Paper Column: Map
When I first arrived in New York, a full week before move-in day at my dorm, my friend and I rented a cheap room in a hostel called The American Dream.
The room’s window faced a finger-distance solid wall, the public toilet was a hole in the wall with a hole in the floor, and walking down the stairs you had to be careful not to trip over any of the 9000 cats beloved (and individually named) by the hostel owner, but god help us if we weren’t the happiest people alive.
Blackened roadside bagels were authentic, hobos were refreshingly outspoken, and, best of all, the road system made sense.
Here, we thought, is a place that recognizes the reason for which numbers and the alphabet were created. Streets run numerically from 1st Street to 127th Street, and Avenues likewise from Avenue D to Avenue A, and then 1st Avenue to 12th.
Easy, we thought. And so we chucked our maps, determined not to be one of those tourists standing on road corners with maps flapping into their faces.
Of course, we proceeded to get thoroughly lost, and then even more lost, and then Jack Nicholson on Oscar night-lost, until finally, standing somewhere between Elridge and Hester (or, as we called them, Wherever and Whatever), we gave up and hailed a cab.
Since then, I have gotten lost a lot more times. Once, I set out at five in the afternoon for a five-thirty dinner party in Little Italy, and arrived at eight, smelling of roast-duck and chicken-rice from my three-year vacation in Chinatown.
You see, the thing about the Manhattan road system is that when you think you’ve got it all figured out, it sucker-punches you when you least expect it.
Roads that are supposed to be straight veer off at weird 32.5-degree angles and change their names. Orderly blocks are intersected in odd places by criss-crossing alleyways called Vandam and Gansevoort.
One moment you’re safely walking along 3rd and 5th, right on time, and the next you’re wondering why Mr. Bayard-Pell and Mr. Wooster are messing up your schedule.
It is, of course, in Chinatown that all hell breaks loose. My teacher once lived in Chinatown, and I wondered how he survived the move from Manhattanville to Salvador Dali-town. There are no cross-roads in Chinatown. There are only octagonal-roads and swirling intersections, where Henry, Madison, Monroe, Mott, Oliver, James, Chatham and Mosco meet, dance, and have tea-parties at poor unsuspecting people’s expenses. I wondered how my teacher managed to make it out of Chinatown before 2030.
But then I remembered that my teacher was already a voting Singaporean long before he moved to New York, much less Chinatown. And if a person can go to sleep as a East Coast-er, and wake up as a Marine Parade-r, when the actual Marine Parade is a 40-minute bus ride away, you’ve got to figure that that person is well equipped for the bizarre ways Manhattan carves itself up while being seemingly well-ordered.
So here’s to Singapore, from New York, and excuse me while I go buy myself a map.
The room’s window faced a finger-distance solid wall, the public toilet was a hole in the wall with a hole in the floor, and walking down the stairs you had to be careful not to trip over any of the 9000 cats beloved (and individually named) by the hostel owner, but god help us if we weren’t the happiest people alive.
Blackened roadside bagels were authentic, hobos were refreshingly outspoken, and, best of all, the road system made sense.
Here, we thought, is a place that recognizes the reason for which numbers and the alphabet were created. Streets run numerically from 1st Street to 127th Street, and Avenues likewise from Avenue D to Avenue A, and then 1st Avenue to 12th.
Easy, we thought. And so we chucked our maps, determined not to be one of those tourists standing on road corners with maps flapping into their faces.
Of course, we proceeded to get thoroughly lost, and then even more lost, and then Jack Nicholson on Oscar night-lost, until finally, standing somewhere between Elridge and Hester (or, as we called them, Wherever and Whatever), we gave up and hailed a cab.
Since then, I have gotten lost a lot more times. Once, I set out at five in the afternoon for a five-thirty dinner party in Little Italy, and arrived at eight, smelling of roast-duck and chicken-rice from my three-year vacation in Chinatown.
You see, the thing about the Manhattan road system is that when you think you’ve got it all figured out, it sucker-punches you when you least expect it.
Roads that are supposed to be straight veer off at weird 32.5-degree angles and change their names. Orderly blocks are intersected in odd places by criss-crossing alleyways called Vandam and Gansevoort.
One moment you’re safely walking along 3rd and 5th, right on time, and the next you’re wondering why Mr. Bayard-Pell and Mr. Wooster are messing up your schedule.
It is, of course, in Chinatown that all hell breaks loose. My teacher once lived in Chinatown, and I wondered how he survived the move from Manhattanville to Salvador Dali-town. There are no cross-roads in Chinatown. There are only octagonal-roads and swirling intersections, where Henry, Madison, Monroe, Mott, Oliver, James, Chatham and Mosco meet, dance, and have tea-parties at poor unsuspecting people’s expenses. I wondered how my teacher managed to make it out of Chinatown before 2030.
But then I remembered that my teacher was already a voting Singaporean long before he moved to New York, much less Chinatown. And if a person can go to sleep as a East Coast-er, and wake up as a Marine Parade-r, when the actual Marine Parade is a 40-minute bus ride away, you’ve got to figure that that person is well equipped for the bizarre ways Manhattan carves itself up while being seemingly well-ordered.
So here’s to Singapore, from New York, and excuse me while I go buy myself a map.
The New Paper Column: Night
On a late night several weeks ago one of my floormates was getting sick of being killed by zombies in Resident Evil 4. Another was hungry, a third “kind of remembered where this really famous 24-hour place was”, and that was how I ended up going out at three in the morning in search of the elusive Papaya Dog.
Papaya Dog, by the way, is an American chain that sells ‘hot dog with papaya juice’ combos. No, I don’t understand it either. But this is the country that greenlighted Son Of The Mask, the country that allowed Britney Spears to have a baby, and the country that continues to tolerate the Bush administration, so I suppose ‘hot dog and papaya juice’ companies make about as much sense as anything else.
In any case, it was three in the morning, and, because my floormate had insisted that he could remember where the place was without a “wussy” map, we were always “almost there”.
Drug dealers who would laugh in our faces if they knew how much money we had were offering us crack, police cars were having fun slowing down when they drove past us, and hobos were yelling things about our mothers this family paper probably couldn’t print, but we were “almost there, really. The next avenue, I think”.
The thing is, after forty-five minutes of ‘almost there’s, you start to tune out the sound, much like the way you automatically begin wondering how many fingers will fall off from the cold, and the way you start trying to remember the exact definition of ‘justifiable homicide’.
But at the same time, little details begin to catch your senses. The way drunks weave, stagger, and twirl one another around, for example, with oddly poetic grace (this is, of course, before they all fall down, like a weird NC-17 nursery rhyme).
The way people who are gangsters in the day enter Dunkin Donuts at night and ask politely for croissants.
The way the empty streets almost glow in the fluorescently amber hue of night lamps, as bits of paper and pages of newspapers flirt and dance above the tarmac ground.
The way friends, gathered in the a.m. hours under alfresco awnings, reminisce, gossip, and laugh in ways you just know would never happen at any other time, their voices seemingly coaxed out of their mouths by the night itself.
We did find Papaya Dog in the end (“Man! I totally told you it was here, didn’t I?”). And about half an hour after we found it, I was staring outside my 13th floor NYU dorm clear glass window. Some apartment lights that were switched on before we left were still on, and I felt really sorry for them.
My mother had warned me about Manhattan after dark (my brother, on the other hand, warned me that most drug dealers after dark were really undercover policemen), but she didn’t put much effort into it.
Maybe she knew it was futile, but I also think that maybe she also knew she’d brought me up in a way that would allow her to sleep at night while I’m here.
Because, really, my mother’s too smart not to know that people, especially teenagers, won’t just switch off after 11 p.m.
Papaya Dog, by the way, is an American chain that sells ‘hot dog with papaya juice’ combos. No, I don’t understand it either. But this is the country that greenlighted Son Of The Mask, the country that allowed Britney Spears to have a baby, and the country that continues to tolerate the Bush administration, so I suppose ‘hot dog and papaya juice’ companies make about as much sense as anything else.
In any case, it was three in the morning, and, because my floormate had insisted that he could remember where the place was without a “wussy” map, we were always “almost there”.
Drug dealers who would laugh in our faces if they knew how much money we had were offering us crack, police cars were having fun slowing down when they drove past us, and hobos were yelling things about our mothers this family paper probably couldn’t print, but we were “almost there, really. The next avenue, I think”.
The thing is, after forty-five minutes of ‘almost there’s, you start to tune out the sound, much like the way you automatically begin wondering how many fingers will fall off from the cold, and the way you start trying to remember the exact definition of ‘justifiable homicide’.
But at the same time, little details begin to catch your senses. The way drunks weave, stagger, and twirl one another around, for example, with oddly poetic grace (this is, of course, before they all fall down, like a weird NC-17 nursery rhyme).
The way people who are gangsters in the day enter Dunkin Donuts at night and ask politely for croissants.
The way the empty streets almost glow in the fluorescently amber hue of night lamps, as bits of paper and pages of newspapers flirt and dance above the tarmac ground.
The way friends, gathered in the a.m. hours under alfresco awnings, reminisce, gossip, and laugh in ways you just know would never happen at any other time, their voices seemingly coaxed out of their mouths by the night itself.
We did find Papaya Dog in the end (“Man! I totally told you it was here, didn’t I?”). And about half an hour after we found it, I was staring outside my 13th floor NYU dorm clear glass window. Some apartment lights that were switched on before we left were still on, and I felt really sorry for them.
My mother had warned me about Manhattan after dark (my brother, on the other hand, warned me that most drug dealers after dark were really undercover policemen), but she didn’t put much effort into it.
Maybe she knew it was futile, but I also think that maybe she also knew she’d brought me up in a way that would allow her to sleep at night while I’m here.
Because, really, my mother’s too smart not to know that people, especially teenagers, won’t just switch off after 11 p.m.
The New Paper Column: NS
I was trying to explain the concept of National Service to my roommate. “Twelve or more guys share a bunk, each has his own small space, and they all try not to kill each other,” I said, to begin with.
“So it’s like us,” my roommate replied. “Except with more space.”
Despite the disturbing news that my roommate had been trying not to kill me, I realized that he was right. Living in a New York University dorm is remarkably like being back in Singapore and serving National Service all over again. As weird as that might sound, the lessons of both are actually quite similar.
For example: Your fellow third sergeants won’t turn off the television because they’ve decided to watch pirated DVDs until four in the morning the night before an exercise. You try not to kill them. Your floor-mates decide that four in the morning before an exam is the best time to relieve stress by belting out rock songs on their guitars. You try not to kill them. See? That’s tolerance right there.
In fact, living here in New York has taught me some lessons that even National Service could not teach.
Take area cleaning, for instance. During National Service, servicemen are forced to clean their sleeping and company areas, in an effort to instill in them the virtues of housekeeping. I have two elder brothers, and I can safely tell you that I don’t think a week of fear-induced cleaning has ever encouraged anyone to clean some more when he gets home. Quite the opposite, in fact.
But after a semester at Columbia University, my elder brother immediately started volunteering to help my mother mop the floor twice a week. I used to wonder why. I don’t anymore. I’m guessing he probably found week-old pizza slices under the couch. Or he just got tired of stepping on wasabi peas constantly. Or maybe he stepped on a fork that was bizarrely on the bathroom floor. These are only guesses, you understand, but for some reason I’m pretty sure one of them is right.
And then of course there’s the fact that National Service is supposed to teach you discipline, through the inculcation of routines, timetables, and all that fun stuff. I don’t know. I don’t really find myself obsessing over whether my toothbrush is placed exactly correctly, or whether my shoes are placed in a certain order. I do know, however, that the one hour I spent trying not to stuff a drunk sorority girl’s head into a microwave probably taught me enough discipline to last a whole life’s worth of drunk people.
Why am I so sure? Well, if I didn’t do it when she said this: “Am I hot? No. Really? I’m hot? No. I’m not hot. My boyfriend tells me I’m hot. Did I say I was hot? I’m not hot. I’m hot. I’m hot, right? This is a nice microwave. Can I borrow your microwave? You have a very nice microwave. Am I hot? Hot? Not hot? Don’t lie to me. I’m hot. I’m so hot. My boyfriend tells me I’m hot. Wow. Like, awesome microwave. I’m not usually like this. I’m so totally usually not like this. I’m awesome when I’m not drunk. Really! I’m so hot.” And so forth… and forth… and forth.
I could go on some more, about many other things, but I think you get the idea.
Which is why, if I make it back to Singapore in one piece, without any homicides, or drug raps, or alcoholism problems on my record, I’d have become a pretty good person, right? And if I were also to bring fame to Singapore? Like say if I were to become… a world-class pianist?
“So it’s like us,” my roommate replied. “Except with more space.”
Despite the disturbing news that my roommate had been trying not to kill me, I realized that he was right. Living in a New York University dorm is remarkably like being back in Singapore and serving National Service all over again. As weird as that might sound, the lessons of both are actually quite similar.
For example: Your fellow third sergeants won’t turn off the television because they’ve decided to watch pirated DVDs until four in the morning the night before an exercise. You try not to kill them. Your floor-mates decide that four in the morning before an exam is the best time to relieve stress by belting out rock songs on their guitars. You try not to kill them. See? That’s tolerance right there.
In fact, living here in New York has taught me some lessons that even National Service could not teach.
Take area cleaning, for instance. During National Service, servicemen are forced to clean their sleeping and company areas, in an effort to instill in them the virtues of housekeeping. I have two elder brothers, and I can safely tell you that I don’t think a week of fear-induced cleaning has ever encouraged anyone to clean some more when he gets home. Quite the opposite, in fact.
But after a semester at Columbia University, my elder brother immediately started volunteering to help my mother mop the floor twice a week. I used to wonder why. I don’t anymore. I’m guessing he probably found week-old pizza slices under the couch. Or he just got tired of stepping on wasabi peas constantly. Or maybe he stepped on a fork that was bizarrely on the bathroom floor. These are only guesses, you understand, but for some reason I’m pretty sure one of them is right.
And then of course there’s the fact that National Service is supposed to teach you discipline, through the inculcation of routines, timetables, and all that fun stuff. I don’t know. I don’t really find myself obsessing over whether my toothbrush is placed exactly correctly, or whether my shoes are placed in a certain order. I do know, however, that the one hour I spent trying not to stuff a drunk sorority girl’s head into a microwave probably taught me enough discipline to last a whole life’s worth of drunk people.
Why am I so sure? Well, if I didn’t do it when she said this: “Am I hot? No. Really? I’m hot? No. I’m not hot. My boyfriend tells me I’m hot. Did I say I was hot? I’m not hot. I’m hot. I’m hot, right? This is a nice microwave. Can I borrow your microwave? You have a very nice microwave. Am I hot? Hot? Not hot? Don’t lie to me. I’m hot. I’m so hot. My boyfriend tells me I’m hot. Wow. Like, awesome microwave. I’m not usually like this. I’m so totally usually not like this. I’m awesome when I’m not drunk. Really! I’m so hot.” And so forth… and forth… and forth.
I could go on some more, about many other things, but I think you get the idea.
Which is why, if I make it back to Singapore in one piece, without any homicides, or drug raps, or alcoholism problems on my record, I’d have become a pretty good person, right? And if I were also to bring fame to Singapore? Like say if I were to become… a world-class pianist?
The New Paper Column: Shows
Winter hiatus. It takes place every year in America from late November to early February, and is the time during which TV networks regroup, reschedule, rewrite, and, while all that fun stuff is going on, repeat.
In other words, this is when there are 999 channels but nothing to watch.
Luckily, within any ten-block radius in New York City there are anywhere between 50 to 100 DVD shops. From monster-hits like Lost and Desperate Housewives, to critically-acclaimed (and therefore nobody-watched) gems like Veronica Mars and Firefly, to shows including Scrubs and Newsradio, if it once existed, you can bet that it’s probably languishing on a shelf somewhere in DVD form.
Which brings us to the DVD that I found two days ago. It’s called Sports Night, and ran between 1998-2000 (tagline: “It’s about sports. The same way Charlie’s Angels was about law enforcement.”).
Sports Night never really caught on, and was axed by ABC despite 10 Golden Globes and 21 nominations. But although it shared superficially nothing in common with Sex And The City, which also premiered in 1998, it was as brilliant as City, and for the same reasons.
Most of the people who watched City will tell you that they started for the sex, but stayed for the stories. It’s easy to be ground-breaking, but there’s got to be something there underneath the surface if you want people to stay. Friends was a pop culture phenomenon because beneath all the canned laughter and glitzy living was heart. Joey looks headed for cancellation because it’s a shiny but ultimately shallow product. The creators of Lost don’t stress how much money the pilot cost (US $10m), but keep repeating in interviews that it’s a story about people and how people relate to each other.
It’s about people and how they relate to each other. It’s a simple enough maxim, but one that isn’t followed very often. That is why, after having channel-surfed through enough shows to know, I can tell you definitively that America is just as capable of producing entertainment garbage as Singapore is (and has). But the flip side of that argument is that Singapore is as capable of producing quality shows as America is. And when it does, people do notice.
Royston Tan created the international festival-touring Fifteen. Eric Khoo’s Be With Me only failed to qualify for the Oscars on a technicality, and Tan Pin Pin’s Singapore Gaga actually did win an Oscar. Even Mediacorp, creator of the vomit-inducing Beautiful Connection (better known as Jiu Ceng Gao), the atrocious Living With Lydia, and the current rehash Love Concierge, once fanned a national fervor comparable to that of Lost and Housewives with its unmatched drama-thon Holland V.
All of these were quality shows because they were about people, real people, and about how these people related realistically to each other. The gangsters of Fifteen weren’t just Ah-Bengs. The cast of Singapore Gaga revealed the reality of Singapore behind Tourist Singapore. Mo Wanwan wasn’t just a fierce dragon-lady, Mo Yanyan wasn’t just a Villain, and Mo Jingjing wasn’t just innocent and cute.
Singapore is just as capable of telling good stories as America is. But it’s not an easy job, and you have to keep working at it, just as we journalists have to keep working to find the best ways to give you the best stories. And so it is one of my wishes for 2006 that Singapore excels not just economically, but artistically as well.
And yes, that means you too, Mediacorp. So can you please lay off the ‘conniving and evil sister’, ‘secretly rich and handsome guy’, and ‘innocent damsel-in-distress’ stereotypes already? The Mo family would be ashamed.
In other words, this is when there are 999 channels but nothing to watch.
Luckily, within any ten-block radius in New York City there are anywhere between 50 to 100 DVD shops. From monster-hits like Lost and Desperate Housewives, to critically-acclaimed (and therefore nobody-watched) gems like Veronica Mars and Firefly, to shows including Scrubs and Newsradio, if it once existed, you can bet that it’s probably languishing on a shelf somewhere in DVD form.
Which brings us to the DVD that I found two days ago. It’s called Sports Night, and ran between 1998-2000 (tagline: “It’s about sports. The same way Charlie’s Angels was about law enforcement.”).
Sports Night never really caught on, and was axed by ABC despite 10 Golden Globes and 21 nominations. But although it shared superficially nothing in common with Sex And The City, which also premiered in 1998, it was as brilliant as City, and for the same reasons.
Most of the people who watched City will tell you that they started for the sex, but stayed for the stories. It’s easy to be ground-breaking, but there’s got to be something there underneath the surface if you want people to stay. Friends was a pop culture phenomenon because beneath all the canned laughter and glitzy living was heart. Joey looks headed for cancellation because it’s a shiny but ultimately shallow product. The creators of Lost don’t stress how much money the pilot cost (US $10m), but keep repeating in interviews that it’s a story about people and how people relate to each other.
It’s about people and how they relate to each other. It’s a simple enough maxim, but one that isn’t followed very often. That is why, after having channel-surfed through enough shows to know, I can tell you definitively that America is just as capable of producing entertainment garbage as Singapore is (and has). But the flip side of that argument is that Singapore is as capable of producing quality shows as America is. And when it does, people do notice.
Royston Tan created the international festival-touring Fifteen. Eric Khoo’s Be With Me only failed to qualify for the Oscars on a technicality, and Tan Pin Pin’s Singapore Gaga actually did win an Oscar. Even Mediacorp, creator of the vomit-inducing Beautiful Connection (better known as Jiu Ceng Gao), the atrocious Living With Lydia, and the current rehash Love Concierge, once fanned a national fervor comparable to that of Lost and Housewives with its unmatched drama-thon Holland V.
All of these were quality shows because they were about people, real people, and about how these people related realistically to each other. The gangsters of Fifteen weren’t just Ah-Bengs. The cast of Singapore Gaga revealed the reality of Singapore behind Tourist Singapore. Mo Wanwan wasn’t just a fierce dragon-lady, Mo Yanyan wasn’t just a Villain, and Mo Jingjing wasn’t just innocent and cute.
Singapore is just as capable of telling good stories as America is. But it’s not an easy job, and you have to keep working at it, just as we journalists have to keep working to find the best ways to give you the best stories. And so it is one of my wishes for 2006 that Singapore excels not just economically, but artistically as well.
And yes, that means you too, Mediacorp. So can you please lay off the ‘conniving and evil sister’, ‘secretly rich and handsome guy’, and ‘innocent damsel-in-distress’ stereotypes already? The Mo family would be ashamed.
The New Paper Column: Sex
The view from my dorm’s common room window is amazing. You can see the Empire State Building in the distance, the Manhattan Bridge nearby, and, every Thursday night, the free sex show from a college student in the opposite tower.
Yes, you read the last statement correctly.
The first time she brought a guy over, she forgot to pull down the blinds. The second time, it wasn’t because she forgot. In the third week, a unanimous decision was made in my dorm that we should watch The O.C. somewhere else. Since then, various elevator conversations have convinced me that That Girl’s show is even more regular than network TV (and a lot less censored).
You would think that this exhibitionistic behavior was mostly confined to the West. In Singapore, for example, you would never walk in on university students having sex in a Starbucks toilet (which has happened to me twice in the last month).
But are Singapore and the US really that different? In last year’s Durex Global Sex Survey, Singapore was second last out of 41 countries when it came to frequency of sex. But according to various articles in The Straits Times and this paper, sex shops have penetrated downtown and heartland office spaces in the past year, making exciting profit figures selling erotic toys to naughty boardgames to kinky lingerie.
According to my friends, it’s also long been an open secret that, among other places, you can catch a R(A) movie if you walk by a certain downtown school that has glass-walled study rooms.
With Singapore’s first-ever Sex Expo soon to open, we seem to be gradually adopting the West’s openness about sex. But we’re also similar in another disturbing way.
Sex education is a divisive topic here in the US. Morning-after pills targeted at 17 or older females can prevent pregnancies if taken up to 72 hours post-sex. Last month, a vaccination was also invented that can prevent cervical cancer, a disease that stems largely from a sexually transmitted virus. But both are being blocked from reaching the masses because the government prefers pushing the message of abstinence, and so it can’t be seen to be condoning teenage sex in any way.
We are facing a similar situation in Singapore. Teenagers are becoming increasingly blasé about sex, but the increasingly out-dated message of abstinence is still being pushed. And the result has been published by The Straits Times in various reports, one as recent as two weeks ago: The age-group of 10-19 now make up 6 percent of all sexually-transmitted infection cases, a handful of seventeen year-olds have been diagnosed as HIV+, and the AIDs infection rate has been steadily on the rise. And yet we continue to prevent condoms from being handed out at nation-wide parties, and we continue to think that the abstinence message is working, despite various online studies showing that at least 60 percent of Singaporean teenagers have had multiple sex partners by the time they’re 18.
The results of this year’s Durex Global Sex Survey will be released on Tuesday, but we already know the really important sex numbers. The question is, will we continue to preach only abstinence, when we can all see (sometimes literally) that the college student next door is having sex 53 times a year, at the very, very least?
Yes, you read the last statement correctly.
The first time she brought a guy over, she forgot to pull down the blinds. The second time, it wasn’t because she forgot. In the third week, a unanimous decision was made in my dorm that we should watch The O.C. somewhere else. Since then, various elevator conversations have convinced me that That Girl’s show is even more regular than network TV (and a lot less censored).
You would think that this exhibitionistic behavior was mostly confined to the West. In Singapore, for example, you would never walk in on university students having sex in a Starbucks toilet (which has happened to me twice in the last month).
But are Singapore and the US really that different? In last year’s Durex Global Sex Survey, Singapore was second last out of 41 countries when it came to frequency of sex. But according to various articles in The Straits Times and this paper, sex shops have penetrated downtown and heartland office spaces in the past year, making exciting profit figures selling erotic toys to naughty boardgames to kinky lingerie.
According to my friends, it’s also long been an open secret that, among other places, you can catch a R(A) movie if you walk by a certain downtown school that has glass-walled study rooms.
With Singapore’s first-ever Sex Expo soon to open, we seem to be gradually adopting the West’s openness about sex. But we’re also similar in another disturbing way.
Sex education is a divisive topic here in the US. Morning-after pills targeted at 17 or older females can prevent pregnancies if taken up to 72 hours post-sex. Last month, a vaccination was also invented that can prevent cervical cancer, a disease that stems largely from a sexually transmitted virus. But both are being blocked from reaching the masses because the government prefers pushing the message of abstinence, and so it can’t be seen to be condoning teenage sex in any way.
We are facing a similar situation in Singapore. Teenagers are becoming increasingly blasé about sex, but the increasingly out-dated message of abstinence is still being pushed. And the result has been published by The Straits Times in various reports, one as recent as two weeks ago: The age-group of 10-19 now make up 6 percent of all sexually-transmitted infection cases, a handful of seventeen year-olds have been diagnosed as HIV+, and the AIDs infection rate has been steadily on the rise. And yet we continue to prevent condoms from being handed out at nation-wide parties, and we continue to think that the abstinence message is working, despite various online studies showing that at least 60 percent of Singaporean teenagers have had multiple sex partners by the time they’re 18.
The results of this year’s Durex Global Sex Survey will be released on Tuesday, but we already know the really important sex numbers. The question is, will we continue to preach only abstinence, when we can all see (sometimes literally) that the college student next door is having sex 53 times a year, at the very, very least?
The New Paper Column: Memoirs
“She’s sold her soul and betrayed her country. Hacking her to death would not be good enough.”
The above quote appeared late November in The New York Times, The Guardian, Reuters, Yahoo! News, and MSNBC, among other international media. Is it about a terrorist? Or a traitor caught selling national secrets? Or even just a defector badmouthing her birth country? No. It is about none of these things. It is about Zhang Ziyi, a China-born actress who took on a Japanese role in an American film.
Do not get me wrong. The casting of director Rob Marshall’s latest film adaptation Memoirs Of A Geisha is, at best, insensitive. The Japanese have their right to complain that, for a film about Japanese culture, none of the lead roles have gone to Japanese actresses. The Chinese also have their right to complain that, given Japan’s brutal occupation of China in World War II, Chinese actresses should not be playing sympathetic Japanese roles. Both countries naturally also have the right to complain that Memoirs is a deplorable American film that not only stereotypes Asian actors and actresses, but also Asian culture itself.
But while we should have the right to voice all of these complaints, let us not forget that Memoirs is not about a Chinese actress taking on a Japanese role in an American film. Memoirs is, in order of priority, an American film, starring Chinese actresses, about Japanese culture. It is a blockbuster aiming for ticket sales and Oscars, not a documentary aiming for cultural dialogue and Politics. If a Chinese actress had burned a China flag in Tokyo while pleading eternal allegiance to Japan, this column would be markedly different. But when Marshall himself has emphasized his careless-ness by saying repeatedly that “realism is not (his) chief concern” and that Memoirs “is really meant as a fable”, quarreling over whether Zhang Ziyi should be hacked into tiny little pieces for her participation is like quarreling over whether Jet Li should be castrated for playing an American’s collared Asian pet in the movie Unleashed.
Yes, Memoirs’ embarrassing situation might truly be the only one of its kind, if research gleaned from 47 websites has taught me anything. And yes, Memoirs’ casting director’s cultural cluelessness and general inability to differentiate one ‘yellow-face’ from another is insulting. And yes, Zhang Ziyi could have held out for another less controversial American debut. But this is Hollywood, baby. America’s dream factory is exactly what it is – the maker of two-hour dreams that are sometimes moving, sometimes boring, and sometimes shocking, but always, ultimately, only dreams that don’t really matter, because we know that they’re not accurate.
All that a Hollywood movie tries to be is entertaining. All that we want a Hollywood movie to try to be is entertaining. Blaming Hollywood for not being culturally attuned is like blaming a five-year old for not understanding Plato. In Hollywood, resemblance to reality is first and foremost only a bonus. If we really wanted realism, we’d skip Tinseltown and go straight to newspapers.
It is true that the West could do with a lot more education about the East. Memoirs is only the latest example. But it is also true that the East could stand to care a lot less about the West. And that depends on you and I to know what really matters, and what is just a silly inflammatory sentence spread into flames by flapping media.
The above quote appeared late November in The New York Times, The Guardian, Reuters, Yahoo! News, and MSNBC, among other international media. Is it about a terrorist? Or a traitor caught selling national secrets? Or even just a defector badmouthing her birth country? No. It is about none of these things. It is about Zhang Ziyi, a China-born actress who took on a Japanese role in an American film.
Do not get me wrong. The casting of director Rob Marshall’s latest film adaptation Memoirs Of A Geisha is, at best, insensitive. The Japanese have their right to complain that, for a film about Japanese culture, none of the lead roles have gone to Japanese actresses. The Chinese also have their right to complain that, given Japan’s brutal occupation of China in World War II, Chinese actresses should not be playing sympathetic Japanese roles. Both countries naturally also have the right to complain that Memoirs is a deplorable American film that not only stereotypes Asian actors and actresses, but also Asian culture itself.
But while we should have the right to voice all of these complaints, let us not forget that Memoirs is not about a Chinese actress taking on a Japanese role in an American film. Memoirs is, in order of priority, an American film, starring Chinese actresses, about Japanese culture. It is a blockbuster aiming for ticket sales and Oscars, not a documentary aiming for cultural dialogue and Politics. If a Chinese actress had burned a China flag in Tokyo while pleading eternal allegiance to Japan, this column would be markedly different. But when Marshall himself has emphasized his careless-ness by saying repeatedly that “realism is not (his) chief concern” and that Memoirs “is really meant as a fable”, quarreling over whether Zhang Ziyi should be hacked into tiny little pieces for her participation is like quarreling over whether Jet Li should be castrated for playing an American’s collared Asian pet in the movie Unleashed.
Yes, Memoirs’ embarrassing situation might truly be the only one of its kind, if research gleaned from 47 websites has taught me anything. And yes, Memoirs’ casting director’s cultural cluelessness and general inability to differentiate one ‘yellow-face’ from another is insulting. And yes, Zhang Ziyi could have held out for another less controversial American debut. But this is Hollywood, baby. America’s dream factory is exactly what it is – the maker of two-hour dreams that are sometimes moving, sometimes boring, and sometimes shocking, but always, ultimately, only dreams that don’t really matter, because we know that they’re not accurate.
All that a Hollywood movie tries to be is entertaining. All that we want a Hollywood movie to try to be is entertaining. Blaming Hollywood for not being culturally attuned is like blaming a five-year old for not understanding Plato. In Hollywood, resemblance to reality is first and foremost only a bonus. If we really wanted realism, we’d skip Tinseltown and go straight to newspapers.
It is true that the West could do with a lot more education about the East. Memoirs is only the latest example. But it is also true that the East could stand to care a lot less about the West. And that depends on you and I to know what really matters, and what is just a silly inflammatory sentence spread into flames by flapping media.
The New Paper Column: Food
I don’t know how any Singaporean could really be homesick in New York City. In the past few months, I’ve discovered not only Singaporean Fried Rice, but also Singapore Mai Fun (mee-fun, or vermicelli), Singaporean Noodles, and, my personal favourite, Singaporean Cookies.
(The search for Singaporean Steak, Singaporean Hot Dog, and Singaporean Salad is still ongoing. Stay tuned!)
There is, of course, nothing even vaguely Singaporean about these ‘Singaporean’ dishes.
But that problem hasn’t stopped enterprising five-dollar restaurants from exploiting our name, betting on the fact that most broke American college students still think of Singapore as some exotic locale. Sadly, for the most part, these restaurateurs have gotten it right.
Whether served in an American-run Japanese sushi-bar, or in a Taiwanese-run Chinese takeout place, I’ve seen (and complained about) countless fellow students literally swallowing the whole “Singaporean Experience” hook, line, and sinker.
Of course, the co-opting of foreign cuisines to local tastes is nothing new. Singaporean fish and chips differs from Australian fish and chips differs from British fish and chips according to local preferences.
So I really shouldn’t be surprised that in Manhattan Chinese food is not so much Chinese food as it is what Americans think Chinese food should be.
But where, then, does localization end and bastardization begin?
If Singaporean Chicken Rice is simply white rice fried with soy sauce, should it still be called Singaporean Chicken Rice, or should it be renamed American Singaporean Chicken Rice, or American Chicken Rice, or something else altogether?
This question, of course, is compounded by an additional problem: Does Singaporean Chicken Rice actually exist? If it does, why should we believe what we have is Chicken Rice in all its definitive Singaporean-ness? And if it doesn’t, how are we to agree on what would actually make our Chicken Rice Singaporean?
And even if we ever did settle on one definitive version of any Singaporean dish, we’d have to figure out one more thing: Do we insist on the purity of Singaporean flavour, and attempt to sue, torch, behead, kidnap, or otherwise eliminate all other rivals who claim to speak for us?
Or do we stand idly by and wait for non-Singaporeans to invent satirical Singaporean Burgers, Singaporean Falafels and Singaporean Pasta, which we will only know about too late when we see them in international supermarkets?
It would be so easy to think that Singapore’s culinary fate rests between these two extremes, but add in Singaporeans who struggle to explain to others why Singapore has no distinctive cuisine, Singaporeans who themselves laugh about Singapore’s melting pot of all foreign foods, and more, and the issue becomes a lot more complicated.
If somebody starts selling Singaporean Cheesecake one day, I don’t think I could arbitrate between the person selling it, and the person picketing outside, because there is no right or wrong here, only different priorities, and to ‘settle’ the question with platitudes about the freedom of selling cheesecake or “rights coming with responsibilities” (as one letter in a local paper read recently) is simplistic and naïve.
But I will say that if the day comes when even cheesecake is a hot-button issue, I hope that by that time we will have learned the value of dialogue, and not have to resort to either jerry cans of kerosene, or spiteful rhetoric in national papers.
(The search for Singaporean Steak, Singaporean Hot Dog, and Singaporean Salad is still ongoing. Stay tuned!)
There is, of course, nothing even vaguely Singaporean about these ‘Singaporean’ dishes.
But that problem hasn’t stopped enterprising five-dollar restaurants from exploiting our name, betting on the fact that most broke American college students still think of Singapore as some exotic locale. Sadly, for the most part, these restaurateurs have gotten it right.
Whether served in an American-run Japanese sushi-bar, or in a Taiwanese-run Chinese takeout place, I’ve seen (and complained about) countless fellow students literally swallowing the whole “Singaporean Experience” hook, line, and sinker.
Of course, the co-opting of foreign cuisines to local tastes is nothing new. Singaporean fish and chips differs from Australian fish and chips differs from British fish and chips according to local preferences.
So I really shouldn’t be surprised that in Manhattan Chinese food is not so much Chinese food as it is what Americans think Chinese food should be.
But where, then, does localization end and bastardization begin?
If Singaporean Chicken Rice is simply white rice fried with soy sauce, should it still be called Singaporean Chicken Rice, or should it be renamed American Singaporean Chicken Rice, or American Chicken Rice, or something else altogether?
This question, of course, is compounded by an additional problem: Does Singaporean Chicken Rice actually exist? If it does, why should we believe what we have is Chicken Rice in all its definitive Singaporean-ness? And if it doesn’t, how are we to agree on what would actually make our Chicken Rice Singaporean?
And even if we ever did settle on one definitive version of any Singaporean dish, we’d have to figure out one more thing: Do we insist on the purity of Singaporean flavour, and attempt to sue, torch, behead, kidnap, or otherwise eliminate all other rivals who claim to speak for us?
Or do we stand idly by and wait for non-Singaporeans to invent satirical Singaporean Burgers, Singaporean Falafels and Singaporean Pasta, which we will only know about too late when we see them in international supermarkets?
It would be so easy to think that Singapore’s culinary fate rests between these two extremes, but add in Singaporeans who struggle to explain to others why Singapore has no distinctive cuisine, Singaporeans who themselves laugh about Singapore’s melting pot of all foreign foods, and more, and the issue becomes a lot more complicated.
If somebody starts selling Singaporean Cheesecake one day, I don’t think I could arbitrate between the person selling it, and the person picketing outside, because there is no right or wrong here, only different priorities, and to ‘settle’ the question with platitudes about the freedom of selling cheesecake or “rights coming with responsibilities” (as one letter in a local paper read recently) is simplistic and naïve.
But I will say that if the day comes when even cheesecake is a hot-button issue, I hope that by that time we will have learned the value of dialogue, and not have to resort to either jerry cans of kerosene, or spiteful rhetoric in national papers.
The New Paper Column: Face
If we Singaporeans do only one thing better than the rest of the world, it’s saving face. So we’ve had a really horrible year of negative international publicity, with the A*Star debacle, our Press Freedom Index ranking, and now accusations of treating Australia with contempt regarding Australian death-sentenced drug trafficker Nguyen Tuong Van. If we know anything about saving face, it’s that it means never having to admit that we’re wrong, even if we are (and I’m not saying that we are, necessarily), and never having to say sorry even if we do admit that a mistake has been made. Since we have done neither despite considerable pressure, I can say that we are indeed very good at saving face.
But I’m no longer sure that we save face better than everyone else.
Unlike Singapore, a person in America is more likely to get run over by a cyclist than a driver. Unlike Singapore, there is only one 7-11 in the whole of Manhattan. But like Singapore, Americans are just as good, if not better, at saving face.
Hands up if you are now the owner or soon-to-be owner of an Xbox 360. Okay, for those of you now being stared at by everyone around you, I have more bad news. Of the power cords sent out with the 360s, a fraction easily overheats, making the entire system crash. Barely fifteen minutes after the launch of the 360 in America, buyers started reporting a range of error messages (much like Microsoft PCs’ infamous Blue Screen of Death, only black). Microsoft spokeswoman Molly O’Donnell responded that the distress calls represent “a very, very small fraction”, and offered to replace damaged systems. The official stand is that “with any launch of this magnitude, you are bound to see something happening”. All well and good – except that in March this year, Microsoft recalled 14 million Xbox power cords. Coincidence?
Of course, Microsoft’s mini-maybe-disaster is nothing compared to the cases of Apple and the American arm of Sony Electronics. Just days after the Ipod Nano’s launch in September, disgruntled consumers reported that the Nano’s screen scratches “insanely easily”. Despite initially denying, denying, and denying (head of Apple’s Ipod division Jon Rubenstein said that perhaps buyers should not “keep it in a pocket with your keys”), Apple was forced, five days and thousands of complaints later, to admit that “less than one-tenth of one percent” (sound familiar?) was shipped faulty. Even today, there has been no further admission, or apology, despite an ongoing lawsuit brought by consumers from the US, the UK, and Mexico.
As for Sony Electronics, well, where to begin? At least 52 Sony BMG titles have been identified so far as containing the vicious rootkit program, a copy-protection program that unfortunately invites hackers and viruses. But instead of issuing an apology in the first week of November, when the problem was identified, Sony issued two weeks later a software patch that created even worse problems for the computers. Only on 18 November did Sony issue an official apology – an apology that contained a lot of technical jargon, an exchange program, but not the simple word ‘sorry’, or even the phrase ‘we were wrong’.
Of course, it might seem petty to quibble about Microsoft, Apple, or Sony’s face-saving. After all, you might say, no one got physically hurt, or even killed. But think about the soldiers in Iraq who are dying because an American president won’t admit he is wrong. Think about Singapore’s reputation, which has been battered in international papers this year, with some blows not entirely undeserved. Sorry seems to be the hardest word, yes, but sometimes saving face means knowing when to say it.
But I’m no longer sure that we save face better than everyone else.
Unlike Singapore, a person in America is more likely to get run over by a cyclist than a driver. Unlike Singapore, there is only one 7-11 in the whole of Manhattan. But like Singapore, Americans are just as good, if not better, at saving face.
Hands up if you are now the owner or soon-to-be owner of an Xbox 360. Okay, for those of you now being stared at by everyone around you, I have more bad news. Of the power cords sent out with the 360s, a fraction easily overheats, making the entire system crash. Barely fifteen minutes after the launch of the 360 in America, buyers started reporting a range of error messages (much like Microsoft PCs’ infamous Blue Screen of Death, only black). Microsoft spokeswoman Molly O’Donnell responded that the distress calls represent “a very, very small fraction”, and offered to replace damaged systems. The official stand is that “with any launch of this magnitude, you are bound to see something happening”. All well and good – except that in March this year, Microsoft recalled 14 million Xbox power cords. Coincidence?
Of course, Microsoft’s mini-maybe-disaster is nothing compared to the cases of Apple and the American arm of Sony Electronics. Just days after the Ipod Nano’s launch in September, disgruntled consumers reported that the Nano’s screen scratches “insanely easily”. Despite initially denying, denying, and denying (head of Apple’s Ipod division Jon Rubenstein said that perhaps buyers should not “keep it in a pocket with your keys”), Apple was forced, five days and thousands of complaints later, to admit that “less than one-tenth of one percent” (sound familiar?) was shipped faulty. Even today, there has been no further admission, or apology, despite an ongoing lawsuit brought by consumers from the US, the UK, and Mexico.
As for Sony Electronics, well, where to begin? At least 52 Sony BMG titles have been identified so far as containing the vicious rootkit program, a copy-protection program that unfortunately invites hackers and viruses. But instead of issuing an apology in the first week of November, when the problem was identified, Sony issued two weeks later a software patch that created even worse problems for the computers. Only on 18 November did Sony issue an official apology – an apology that contained a lot of technical jargon, an exchange program, but not the simple word ‘sorry’, or even the phrase ‘we were wrong’.
Of course, it might seem petty to quibble about Microsoft, Apple, or Sony’s face-saving. After all, you might say, no one got physically hurt, or even killed. But think about the soldiers in Iraq who are dying because an American president won’t admit he is wrong. Think about Singapore’s reputation, which has been battered in international papers this year, with some blows not entirely undeserved. Sorry seems to be the hardest word, yes, but sometimes saving face means knowing when to say it.
The New Paper Column: Edu
I am secretly convinced that someone has arranged for a robotic spy to masquerade as my roommate at New York University.
We have both been in New York City for two months now, and my roommate, whom we shall call Caleb, has watched exactly one movie, zero plays, and zero Broadway or off-Broadway shows. In fact, not counting a day walking along Fifth Avenue, his exploration of Manhattan has not exceeded a five-block radius from the NYU campuses.
But it’s not what he hasn’t done that convinces me he is on someone’s payroll. It’s what he has done. For almost every single day now, he has managed to cram in ten-hour reading sessions at the library, in addition to writing papers in our room afterwards.
He even makes disagreeable noises when I’m slacking. Yes, he is even more Singaporean than I am. This is why I am convinced that he is a spy.
As for why I am convinced that he is a robot, just consider this. He has not touched the X-box, nor the Gamecube, nor the Playstation 2 in our suite’s common room once, and if I didn’t switch on the TV in our room occasionally, I am fairly sure that he wouldn’t even have watched a single second of TV. I’m sure you agree that there is simply no way he is even remotely human.
Of course, realizing that you are sleeping (in the same room) with a robotic spy who is likely taking note of your every action is enough to make anyone slightly paranoid. In fact, it is so paranoia-inducing that I’ve taken to recording down my own movements, grades, and time-management in multiple Excel spreadsheets.
Just in case he has managed somehow to install recording devices in my classrooms, I have also taken to shaking my head and making disapproving sounds whenever my professors and schoolmates say and do anything offensive.
When my classmate, who was asked to write and present a monologue, came to class dressed as a transvestite, and described things that even the Karma Sutra would blush at, I tsk-tsked and told him afterwards (just in case the camera was watching) how wrong his monologue was.
When my Terrorism And The Modern Man professor suggested that al-Qaeda’s actions and ideology were understandable, though not tolerable, I almost left the room (I didn’t, because grades are lowered for every two absences).
Even when I’m walking to my classes, I take care to keep a wide distance from those people protesting against either political party, against various laws, against the ban on marijuana as medicine, against student fee hikes, and just in case, even protests against Starbucks. I’ve seen Terminator: Rise Of The Machines, and if Kristanna Loken can be a shape-shifting T-X, then so can my ‘roommate’, right?
I have to admit, though, that all this looking over my shoulder is making me very tired, cranky, and careless. Just the other day I almost cracked and started paying attention when my Literature professor claimed that Hamlet is a badly constructed play, and in the next breath advised us to read Salman Rushdie’s books.
So I’m thinking that maybe I should transfer back to Singapore for a semester or two. I miss the food, I miss my family, and I miss my friends. And more than all of those things I miss the stress of simply having to study and not worry about anything else, especially about why my ‘roommate’ is now staring at me.
What do you guys think?
We have both been in New York City for two months now, and my roommate, whom we shall call Caleb, has watched exactly one movie, zero plays, and zero Broadway or off-Broadway shows. In fact, not counting a day walking along Fifth Avenue, his exploration of Manhattan has not exceeded a five-block radius from the NYU campuses.
But it’s not what he hasn’t done that convinces me he is on someone’s payroll. It’s what he has done. For almost every single day now, he has managed to cram in ten-hour reading sessions at the library, in addition to writing papers in our room afterwards.
He even makes disagreeable noises when I’m slacking. Yes, he is even more Singaporean than I am. This is why I am convinced that he is a spy.
As for why I am convinced that he is a robot, just consider this. He has not touched the X-box, nor the Gamecube, nor the Playstation 2 in our suite’s common room once, and if I didn’t switch on the TV in our room occasionally, I am fairly sure that he wouldn’t even have watched a single second of TV. I’m sure you agree that there is simply no way he is even remotely human.
Of course, realizing that you are sleeping (in the same room) with a robotic spy who is likely taking note of your every action is enough to make anyone slightly paranoid. In fact, it is so paranoia-inducing that I’ve taken to recording down my own movements, grades, and time-management in multiple Excel spreadsheets.
Just in case he has managed somehow to install recording devices in my classrooms, I have also taken to shaking my head and making disapproving sounds whenever my professors and schoolmates say and do anything offensive.
When my classmate, who was asked to write and present a monologue, came to class dressed as a transvestite, and described things that even the Karma Sutra would blush at, I tsk-tsked and told him afterwards (just in case the camera was watching) how wrong his monologue was.
When my Terrorism And The Modern Man professor suggested that al-Qaeda’s actions and ideology were understandable, though not tolerable, I almost left the room (I didn’t, because grades are lowered for every two absences).
Even when I’m walking to my classes, I take care to keep a wide distance from those people protesting against either political party, against various laws, against the ban on marijuana as medicine, against student fee hikes, and just in case, even protests against Starbucks. I’ve seen Terminator: Rise Of The Machines, and if Kristanna Loken can be a shape-shifting T-X, then so can my ‘roommate’, right?
I have to admit, though, that all this looking over my shoulder is making me very tired, cranky, and careless. Just the other day I almost cracked and started paying attention when my Literature professor claimed that Hamlet is a badly constructed play, and in the next breath advised us to read Salman Rushdie’s books.
So I’m thinking that maybe I should transfer back to Singapore for a semester or two. I miss the food, I miss my family, and I miss my friends. And more than all of those things I miss the stress of simply having to study and not worry about anything else, especially about why my ‘roommate’ is now staring at me.
What do you guys think?
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Play: 'Fuck' Is An Easy Word
Dennis is watching T.V. Joey enters and sits. A beat.
JOEY
What are we watching?
DENNIS
Buffy.
JOEY
The vampire show?
DENNIS
Yeah.
A beat.
JOEY
I don’t think I’ve actually seen an entire episode of this before.
DENNIS
It’s great. Joss Whedon is a fucking genius. (beat) I can loan you the DVDs again if you want.
JOEY
That’s okay. I didn’t like it in ‘99 and I’m not going to like it now.
A beat.
JOEY (CONT’D)
(grimacing) Oh man. Why did he do that? Why did he have to do that? That was a perfectly good eye.
DENNIS
It’s to increase the stakes. Dramatic tension, give Buffy a stronger incentive to defeat the First Evil. It’s really well-crafted if you really think about it. (beat) But yeah. Sticking someone’s eye out is pretty gross.
JOEY
I’m glad you think so.
DENNIS
But that’s not the worst part. There was an episode –
JOEY
No, no, that’s okay. (beat) God. You need to warn me when stuff like that’s going to happen. (shudders) I should probably stick to Family Guy.
A beat.
DENNIS
I thought you were doing homework.
JOEY
I was doing homework. (beat) Physics.
DENNIS
I’m so glad I dropped that. I sucked so fucking bad at it.
JOEY
Yeah. I remember. I think you traumatized McMahon for life.
DENNIS
That’s what the fucker wrote in my yearbook. (beat, smiling) What a dickhead. Fuck him. Still got here, didn’t I?
A beat.
JOEY
You still got an A for physics though.
DENNIS
That’s because I did all the questions in the fucking RedSpot book. Twice. (beat) It’s always the same questions year after fucking year after fucking year. I could have done it with my eyes closed.
A beat.
JOEY
Yeah. College physics is a lot more interesting, though. We’re learning some pretty cool stuff.
DENNIS
Like?
JOEY
Quantum physics – that’s stuff to do with time. Space-time continuum. Um. The Banach Tarski Paradox.
DENNIS
Are you just making shit up now?
JOEY
No. I’m not. It’s all in the textbook. I can show you if you don’t believe me.
DENNIS
Uh, no, that’s okay. I believe you.
A beat.
JOEY
So what’s going on in your classes now?
DENNIS
Nothing much. Just boring shit.
JOEY
“Boring shit”? Four months ago you were like, “Yes! I got into Tisch!”, and now it’s “boring shit”?
DENNIS
We’re just doing stupid shit now. Four-page scenes, five-minute colloquiums, bits and pieces. (beat) Plus I think my classmates are all fucking morons.
JOEY
Why?
DENNIS
They’re just so fucking stupid. No. Some of them. Okay. Maybe just one. (beat) We’re supposed to write our opinions on these white cards for colloquium, and someone wrote “Yeah man! Racism Is Kool” about something I did on racial discrimination. Cool with a ‘K’. (beat) Stupid fucker. Didn’t even write his name. (beat) Or her name.
JOEY
(tactfully) Yeah, that sucks.
DENNIS
I bet nobody does that in your physics colloquiums.
JOEY
We don’t have physics colloquiums.
DENNIS
Yeah, see? You guys are smarter already. Colloquiums are stupid. (beat) Fucking stupid.
JOEY
Physics isn’t much better. It’s just a bunch of stupid numbers and equations.
DENNIS
But you like it, right?
JOEY
Well, yeah.
DENNIS
And you’re good at it. No. You’re fucking good at it. McMahon drooled all over you. It was so fucking awkward. Like a man-crush. Except creepier.
JOEY
He wasn’t that smart, actually. (beat) And I’m sure if you keep working at your scripts you’ll get better.
DENNIS
It’s not like physics. There’s no magic book I can read. (beat) If I suck at it I suck at it. And I probably do.
A beat.
JOEY
Yeah. Maybe you do.
DENNIS
Thanks.
JOEY
Yeah. Maybe you really do.
DENNIS
What’s your fucking problem, huh? Why’re you being such a fucking dickhead?
JOEY
I’m tired of you making fun of physics. Physics is not stupid. And it’s not easy. And there is no “magic book”. God!
DENNIS
Okay! I’m sorry. Physics isn’t stupid. It’s very hard stuff for very smart people.
JOEY
Oh, fuck you!
A beat.
DENNIS
I don’t want to quarrel with you, okay? I’m just trying to watch my show.
JOEY
Yeah. Sure. (beat, then almost uncontrollably) You think watching these stupid shows is going to magically improve your writing skills? Please. You suck because you’re lazy and you think it should come easy to you.
DENNIS
Shut the fuck up.
JOEY
Because everything should come easy to you, right? Straight A’s in high school, scholarship…
DENNIS
Hey, I worked for that shit, okay?
JOEY
Please –
DENNIS
I’m a fucking workhorse, grinding away –
A beat.
JOEY
Yeah. Whatever.
DENNIS
(half-angrily) I’m sorry, okay?
JOEY
No, you’re not. You’re sitting here feeling sorry for yourself, but you’re thinking that you’re still better than me because you’re not taking physics anymore. Because you’re a Dramatic Writer now. Big whee.
A beat.
DENNIS
I just don’t like the subject. I’ve told you before. Nothing to do with you personally. I fucking laugh at physics Nobel Prize-winners. Every fucking year I Google the winner and I laugh. You know that. It’s not like it’s fucking new or anything.
A beat.
JOEY
Why are you saying ‘fuck’ every other sentence? It’s not – “awesome”.
A longer beat.
DENNIS
Fuck it. I don’t know. I said ‘fuck’ once, and then I said ‘fuck’ again, and now I can’t wake up without saying ‘fuck’. It just – kinda happened. (beat) You should try it. ‘Fuck’. It’s really easy.
A beat.
JOEY
No… I’m not a ‘fuck’ kind of guy. I just look stupid. Like if I try to say ‘babe’ or ‘dude’. (beat) Or ‘chick’. Some guys just look stupid saying ‘chick’. Or ‘fuck’.
DENNIS
Yeah. (beat) I can’t say ‘babe’ or ‘dude’ too. (beat) You wanna go get a movie from Hollywood Video later? I have a lot of self-pity to wallow through, but I could squeeze in a movie. Or two. If you’re feeling rebellious.
JOEY
Yeah. Okay. (beat, then awkwardly) I’m going to go finish some homework first though.
DENNIS
Yeah. Okay. (beat) I’ll be here.
JOEY
Okay.
JOEY
What are we watching?
DENNIS
Buffy.
JOEY
The vampire show?
DENNIS
Yeah.
A beat.
JOEY
I don’t think I’ve actually seen an entire episode of this before.
DENNIS
It’s great. Joss Whedon is a fucking genius. (beat) I can loan you the DVDs again if you want.
JOEY
That’s okay. I didn’t like it in ‘99 and I’m not going to like it now.
A beat.
JOEY (CONT’D)
(grimacing) Oh man. Why did he do that? Why did he have to do that? That was a perfectly good eye.
DENNIS
It’s to increase the stakes. Dramatic tension, give Buffy a stronger incentive to defeat the First Evil. It’s really well-crafted if you really think about it. (beat) But yeah. Sticking someone’s eye out is pretty gross.
JOEY
I’m glad you think so.
DENNIS
But that’s not the worst part. There was an episode –
JOEY
No, no, that’s okay. (beat) God. You need to warn me when stuff like that’s going to happen. (shudders) I should probably stick to Family Guy.
A beat.
DENNIS
I thought you were doing homework.
JOEY
I was doing homework. (beat) Physics.
DENNIS
I’m so glad I dropped that. I sucked so fucking bad at it.
JOEY
Yeah. I remember. I think you traumatized McMahon for life.
DENNIS
That’s what the fucker wrote in my yearbook. (beat, smiling) What a dickhead. Fuck him. Still got here, didn’t I?
A beat.
JOEY
You still got an A for physics though.
DENNIS
That’s because I did all the questions in the fucking RedSpot book. Twice. (beat) It’s always the same questions year after fucking year after fucking year. I could have done it with my eyes closed.
A beat.
JOEY
Yeah. College physics is a lot more interesting, though. We’re learning some pretty cool stuff.
DENNIS
Like?
JOEY
Quantum physics – that’s stuff to do with time. Space-time continuum. Um. The Banach Tarski Paradox.
DENNIS
Are you just making shit up now?
JOEY
No. I’m not. It’s all in the textbook. I can show you if you don’t believe me.
DENNIS
Uh, no, that’s okay. I believe you.
A beat.
JOEY
So what’s going on in your classes now?
DENNIS
Nothing much. Just boring shit.
JOEY
“Boring shit”? Four months ago you were like, “Yes! I got into Tisch!”, and now it’s “boring shit”?
DENNIS
We’re just doing stupid shit now. Four-page scenes, five-minute colloquiums, bits and pieces. (beat) Plus I think my classmates are all fucking morons.
JOEY
Why?
DENNIS
They’re just so fucking stupid. No. Some of them. Okay. Maybe just one. (beat) We’re supposed to write our opinions on these white cards for colloquium, and someone wrote “Yeah man! Racism Is Kool” about something I did on racial discrimination. Cool with a ‘K’. (beat) Stupid fucker. Didn’t even write his name. (beat) Or her name.
JOEY
(tactfully) Yeah, that sucks.
DENNIS
I bet nobody does that in your physics colloquiums.
JOEY
We don’t have physics colloquiums.
DENNIS
Yeah, see? You guys are smarter already. Colloquiums are stupid. (beat) Fucking stupid.
JOEY
Physics isn’t much better. It’s just a bunch of stupid numbers and equations.
DENNIS
But you like it, right?
JOEY
Well, yeah.
DENNIS
And you’re good at it. No. You’re fucking good at it. McMahon drooled all over you. It was so fucking awkward. Like a man-crush. Except creepier.
JOEY
He wasn’t that smart, actually. (beat) And I’m sure if you keep working at your scripts you’ll get better.
DENNIS
It’s not like physics. There’s no magic book I can read. (beat) If I suck at it I suck at it. And I probably do.
A beat.
JOEY
Yeah. Maybe you do.
DENNIS
Thanks.
JOEY
Yeah. Maybe you really do.
DENNIS
What’s your fucking problem, huh? Why’re you being such a fucking dickhead?
JOEY
I’m tired of you making fun of physics. Physics is not stupid. And it’s not easy. And there is no “magic book”. God!
DENNIS
Okay! I’m sorry. Physics isn’t stupid. It’s very hard stuff for very smart people.
JOEY
Oh, fuck you!
A beat.
DENNIS
I don’t want to quarrel with you, okay? I’m just trying to watch my show.
JOEY
Yeah. Sure. (beat, then almost uncontrollably) You think watching these stupid shows is going to magically improve your writing skills? Please. You suck because you’re lazy and you think it should come easy to you.
DENNIS
Shut the fuck up.
JOEY
Because everything should come easy to you, right? Straight A’s in high school, scholarship…
DENNIS
Hey, I worked for that shit, okay?
JOEY
Please –
DENNIS
I’m a fucking workhorse, grinding away –
A beat.
JOEY
Yeah. Whatever.
DENNIS
(half-angrily) I’m sorry, okay?
JOEY
No, you’re not. You’re sitting here feeling sorry for yourself, but you’re thinking that you’re still better than me because you’re not taking physics anymore. Because you’re a Dramatic Writer now. Big whee.
A beat.
DENNIS
I just don’t like the subject. I’ve told you before. Nothing to do with you personally. I fucking laugh at physics Nobel Prize-winners. Every fucking year I Google the winner and I laugh. You know that. It’s not like it’s fucking new or anything.
A beat.
JOEY
Why are you saying ‘fuck’ every other sentence? It’s not – “awesome”.
A longer beat.
DENNIS
Fuck it. I don’t know. I said ‘fuck’ once, and then I said ‘fuck’ again, and now I can’t wake up without saying ‘fuck’. It just – kinda happened. (beat) You should try it. ‘Fuck’. It’s really easy.
A beat.
JOEY
No… I’m not a ‘fuck’ kind of guy. I just look stupid. Like if I try to say ‘babe’ or ‘dude’. (beat) Or ‘chick’. Some guys just look stupid saying ‘chick’. Or ‘fuck’.
DENNIS
Yeah. (beat) I can’t say ‘babe’ or ‘dude’ too. (beat) You wanna go get a movie from Hollywood Video later? I have a lot of self-pity to wallow through, but I could squeeze in a movie. Or two. If you’re feeling rebellious.
JOEY
Yeah. Okay. (beat, then awkwardly) I’m going to go finish some homework first though.
DENNIS
Yeah. Okay. (beat) I’ll be here.
JOEY
Okay.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Story: An Afternoon At The Strand
The Strand Bookstore. A grid of contained chaos, designed for easy navigation and astonishment. Enter and instantly the layout makes sense, that which can be seen projecting that which cannot. From just one viewable sector is created a whole city of book-streets, each walled by climbing buildings of pages, all planned around an unavoidable and supposedly microcosmic display of focused attention, laminated words, and must-see attractions – that invariably turns out to be so much ephemeral light and sound.
Display Table, it reads on the largest sign of them all, a useless sign, really, because who does not know why these books have been gathered there? A paradoxical place if one ever existed, inextricable from its hometown and yet unrepresentative to the last recommendation (that ends, of course, in a single exclamation mark suggestive of profuseness nonetheless). Why are we drawn and repulsed by these places? Understand this trap, understand its capacity for exposure, a single word simultaneously contradictory. Tap fingers on its glossiness in a faintly disdainful manner, laugh enthusiastically, shuffle, or – it doesn’t matter; under a microscope, all natural behaviors become only interchangeable acts.
Aisles. Is it any wonder, then, that we flee to the alleys like Schrödinger’s cats, shaken and fiercely protective of a single letter, I? Like cemeteries but unlike graves, the lonely aisles are populated only with conclusive specters, people who have chosen, arranged, dressed, pared, and only then said, this is what I am, and then given themselves up completely to our purview, heedless of our capacity for distortion. These, after all, are the solitary tyrannies of book-writers and book-readers; a word written according to one understanding, unchangeable, and a word read according to one understanding, unchangeable, the same word meaning to bridge and meaning to divide. Why do we go to the aisles in The Strand? To seek the common understanding, clearly labeled, of ghosts, and therefore to be alone among friends. When someone asks you, “Did you like it?”, you will understand that mingling of communion and possessiveness. Why else do we really say, “Yes, I liked it”, except to keep our feelings to ourselves? Why else do we keep asking, “Yes! Didn’t you like the part where… and the part where… and the part where…”, except to eventually say, “Well, I…”?
Clear plastic passports, however, always beckon people to them. In The Strand they hang from the necks of employees, but they hang, too, like auras around groups of people, intangible but unmistakable, betrayed by a shared look, a simultaneous smile at objects meaningless to others. People alone in the aisles look longingly on, but what they crave is not the immediate companionship; what they crave is the history. The Strand employees must know this. When they laugh at something that happened yesterday, when they remember that time, an impenetrable barrier flows out from them, and the employee pass becomes a passport to lands impassable to foreigners, similar to those that hang around friends, but with one difference – these are graspable items, achievable, attainable. They are not dependent on the blind groping of likes and dislikes that constitute the messy morasses of relationships; they are in’s designed to be in’s.
Black and white photos, adorning the stairways. Are they not the ultimate goal of all relationships? They prove a common history for those within them (Man. How long ago was this?...). They shut out outsiders (Where did you guys take this?...). They permit us our solitude in our individual remembrances of the events they portray (No! It was like this…). They exist between reality and artificiality (Now, act natural…). But most importantly, they project entire pasts and futures. Neither may exist, but where lies the difference between knowledge and existence?
Display Table, it reads on the largest sign of them all, a useless sign, really, because who does not know why these books have been gathered there? A paradoxical place if one ever existed, inextricable from its hometown and yet unrepresentative to the last recommendation (that ends, of course, in a single exclamation mark suggestive of profuseness nonetheless). Why are we drawn and repulsed by these places? Understand this trap, understand its capacity for exposure, a single word simultaneously contradictory. Tap fingers on its glossiness in a faintly disdainful manner, laugh enthusiastically, shuffle, or – it doesn’t matter; under a microscope, all natural behaviors become only interchangeable acts.
Aisles. Is it any wonder, then, that we flee to the alleys like Schrödinger’s cats, shaken and fiercely protective of a single letter, I? Like cemeteries but unlike graves, the lonely aisles are populated only with conclusive specters, people who have chosen, arranged, dressed, pared, and only then said, this is what I am, and then given themselves up completely to our purview, heedless of our capacity for distortion. These, after all, are the solitary tyrannies of book-writers and book-readers; a word written according to one understanding, unchangeable, and a word read according to one understanding, unchangeable, the same word meaning to bridge and meaning to divide. Why do we go to the aisles in The Strand? To seek the common understanding, clearly labeled, of ghosts, and therefore to be alone among friends. When someone asks you, “Did you like it?”, you will understand that mingling of communion and possessiveness. Why else do we really say, “Yes, I liked it”, except to keep our feelings to ourselves? Why else do we keep asking, “Yes! Didn’t you like the part where… and the part where… and the part where…”, except to eventually say, “Well, I…”?
Clear plastic passports, however, always beckon people to them. In The Strand they hang from the necks of employees, but they hang, too, like auras around groups of people, intangible but unmistakable, betrayed by a shared look, a simultaneous smile at objects meaningless to others. People alone in the aisles look longingly on, but what they crave is not the immediate companionship; what they crave is the history. The Strand employees must know this. When they laugh at something that happened yesterday, when they remember that time, an impenetrable barrier flows out from them, and the employee pass becomes a passport to lands impassable to foreigners, similar to those that hang around friends, but with one difference – these are graspable items, achievable, attainable. They are not dependent on the blind groping of likes and dislikes that constitute the messy morasses of relationships; they are in’s designed to be in’s.
Black and white photos, adorning the stairways. Are they not the ultimate goal of all relationships? They prove a common history for those within them (Man. How long ago was this?...). They shut out outsiders (Where did you guys take this?...). They permit us our solitude in our individual remembrances of the events they portray (No! It was like this…). They exist between reality and artificiality (Now, act natural…). But most importantly, they project entire pasts and futures. Neither may exist, but where lies the difference between knowledge and existence?
Sunday, February 05, 2006
Play: Leaving
ROBERT and LILY are sitting at a café table. He seems slightly dazed, while her hands are fidgeting with a white and glass-lidded box.
LILY
Please, try to understand what it’s like since I’ve been back… Imagine sitting at a table with your friends and everyone’s talking and you smile but you don’t understand and suddenly it seems as if the air itself is filled with noise, and all you want to do is to stop smiling, and walk away so you can breathe without taking in the noise…
Robert shakes his head, and Lily stops fiddling with the box. She leans forward, her hands helpless.
LILY
And then you made this, and you made dinner, and you tried, you tried so hard, and all I could think about was how lost you were, and all I could feel was… pity…
Robert stares at her like a bewildered child. Lily reaches out to hold his hand, but he jerks away.
LILY
I’m sorry… I look at you and everyone else along this street and all I want is to see the people I knew, but I can’t, I can’t help it. I want to run, I want to go up to people and shake them and ask them why they’ve changed, but I can’t, because they’ll ask questions, and I’ll tell them where I’ve been, and what I’ve been doing, and all those words will only take them even further away… Please, try to understand what I’m saying…
A moment hangs in the air, caught, but suddenly Robert stands and walks away.
LILY
Please, try to understand what it’s like since I’ve been back… Imagine sitting at a table with your friends and everyone’s talking and you smile but you don’t understand and suddenly it seems as if the air itself is filled with noise, and all you want to do is to stop smiling, and walk away so you can breathe without taking in the noise…
Robert shakes his head, and Lily stops fiddling with the box. She leans forward, her hands helpless.
LILY
And then you made this, and you made dinner, and you tried, you tried so hard, and all I could think about was how lost you were, and all I could feel was… pity…
Robert stares at her like a bewildered child. Lily reaches out to hold his hand, but he jerks away.
LILY
I’m sorry… I look at you and everyone else along this street and all I want is to see the people I knew, but I can’t, I can’t help it. I want to run, I want to go up to people and shake them and ask them why they’ve changed, but I can’t, because they’ll ask questions, and I’ll tell them where I’ve been, and what I’ve been doing, and all those words will only take them even further away… Please, try to understand what I’m saying…
A moment hangs in the air, caught, but suddenly Robert stands and walks away.
Screenplay: Disordered
FADE IN:
INT. BATHROOM – NIGHT
The storm of a SHOWER suddenly lessens to a trickle, as a curtain of smoky mist slowly dissipates, revealing the wet face of GRACE GELLAR (30) in front of a cream wall washed in warm orange light. She bows her head as a hand appears, covers her face, and sweeps upwards and across her scalp to brush water from her hair. The hand disappears, and her eyes open. She stares straight for a moment, but a door suddenly SLAMS.
INT. CONFINEMENT ROOM – DAY.
Grace’s face, still staring straight, on a field of fluorescent and sterile white. In
the dark irises of her eyes we can see a small figure, lab-coated in white and carrying a tray. The eyes dart left and right, before focusing on the figure again, who has remained motionless throughout. But now the figure, BILLY MORROW (25), takes a step towards her eyes.
BILLY
Grace?
The eyes close for a moment. When they open, Billy is still in them. He grows more distinct as he moves closer to her. When he is right before her, he kneels and lays the tray down. He reaches out a hand, but Grace flinches and tries to swat his hand away. Billy grabs her arm as she struggles and tries to break away.
BILLY
Grace. Grace! Stop it. Stop that!
Grace gradually stops struggling, and remains motionless, almost catatonic. Billy stares at her for a moment, waiting, before he turns to pull the tray a little closer to them.
GRACE
Billy?
Billy turns back to her, with a look of relief. Grace shakes her head.
GRACE
Billy… Billy Morrow…
Billy takes a container of jello and spoons a small amount. Grace’s face is scrunched up in recollection.
GRACE
William Robert Morrow. Graduated Yale – Yale? Harvard? Yale medical school.
Billy proffers the spoon of jello to Grace invitingly. Grace stares at the spoon. She suddenly looks around again, her head jerking this way and that. Billy tenses.
INT. BATHROOM – NIGHT
The storm of a SHOWER suddenly lessens to a trickle, as a curtain of smoky mist slowly dissipates, revealing the wet face of GRACE GELLAR (30) in front of a cream wall washed in warm orange light. She bows her head as a hand appears, covers her face, and sweeps upwards and across her scalp to brush water from her hair. The hand disappears, and her eyes open. She stares straight for a moment, but a door suddenly SLAMS.
INT. CONFINEMENT ROOM – DAY.
Grace’s face, still staring straight, on a field of fluorescent and sterile white. In
the dark irises of her eyes we can see a small figure, lab-coated in white and carrying a tray. The eyes dart left and right, before focusing on the figure again, who has remained motionless throughout. But now the figure, BILLY MORROW (25), takes a step towards her eyes.
BILLY
Grace?
The eyes close for a moment. When they open, Billy is still in them. He grows more distinct as he moves closer to her. When he is right before her, he kneels and lays the tray down. He reaches out a hand, but Grace flinches and tries to swat his hand away. Billy grabs her arm as she struggles and tries to break away.
BILLY
Grace. Grace! Stop it. Stop that!
Grace gradually stops struggling, and remains motionless, almost catatonic. Billy stares at her for a moment, waiting, before he turns to pull the tray a little closer to them.
GRACE
Billy?
Billy turns back to her, with a look of relief. Grace shakes her head.
GRACE
Billy… Billy Morrow…
Billy takes a container of jello and spoons a small amount. Grace’s face is scrunched up in recollection.
GRACE
William Robert Morrow. Graduated Yale – Yale? Harvard? Yale medical school.
Billy proffers the spoon of jello to Grace invitingly. Grace stares at the spoon. She suddenly looks around again, her head jerking this way and that. Billy tenses.
Play: Distanced
Two roommates, ELIZABETH and NICA, are in their room. Books and files are strewn everywhere. Nica is reading, while Elizabeth is trying to decide where to mount a white and glass-lidded box on her crowded wall.
ELIZABETH
I can’t seem to find a place for this.
Elizabeth sits, the box in hand.
ELIZABETH
(to Nica) You liked her, right? Nicole? I know she was a little… quiet? But she’s not usually like that. (Nica shrugs) I mean, she’s really crazy. When we were in Cherry Hills, she’d flash random guys and dance on tables like she was smashed, only she never was, and she’d remember everything and laugh about it the next day. She was really crazy…
Elizabeth pauses, thinking.
ELIZABETH
Maybe she was just sick… (to Nica) Did she say anything to you? (Nica shakes her head) Right, of course… I did ask her at the train station when she gave this to me, but she said nothing was wrong. Maybe she just doesn’t like the city. I mean, I’m sure there are people who don’t, right? (pauses, nodding) Yeah… (pauses again) I should find some place to put this.
Elizabeth gets up and surveys her wall. She makes space for the box, but when she turns away it falls and the glass lid shatters.
ELIZABETH
I can’t seem to find a place for this.
Elizabeth sits, the box in hand.
ELIZABETH
(to Nica) You liked her, right? Nicole? I know she was a little… quiet? But she’s not usually like that. (Nica shrugs) I mean, she’s really crazy. When we were in Cherry Hills, she’d flash random guys and dance on tables like she was smashed, only she never was, and she’d remember everything and laugh about it the next day. She was really crazy…
Elizabeth pauses, thinking.
ELIZABETH
Maybe she was just sick… (to Nica) Did she say anything to you? (Nica shakes her head) Right, of course… I did ask her at the train station when she gave this to me, but she said nothing was wrong. Maybe she just doesn’t like the city. I mean, I’m sure there are people who don’t, right? (pauses, nodding) Yeah… (pauses again) I should find some place to put this.
Elizabeth gets up and surveys her wall. She makes space for the box, but when she turns away it falls and the glass lid shatters.
Screenplay: Ethan Frome
EXT. FIELD - DAWN
A vast tree strains towards the sky, framed against snow so white and reductive that all sense of depth is lost. Glimmering from everything is a pale and faintly purple light, the light of dawn that passes so easily for dusk.
A MURMUR of wind INTENSIFIES slowly, and the smaller and defenseless twigs of the
tree’s crown begin to shiver.
The twigs vibrate, fighting against the relentless wind, until, finally, a TWIG snaps.
It is borne on the currents of the wind. This solid twig drifts and circles in the air as it falls, tossed and turned like a wisp of fluff by an invisible force.
It finally settles on the ground. Only a moment passes, before it is obliterated by A HEAVY BOOT.
A bulk of clothes shaped like a person stands in the snow, the vast tree a short distance away. Only a sliver of face peeks out from underneath the layers, but it is enough to suggest that this figure is one of freezing femininity. This is MATTIE SILVER (23).
Mattie crosses her gloved hands under her armpits as she trembles her way to the tree, her difficulty against the wind betraying a slip of a woman underneath the bulk.
She reaches the tree, and leans against it for a moment. Then she circles the tree, until it shields her against the bitter wind.
Mattie sits down, letting the vast tree support her back. A twig falls on her head, and then onto her lap. She takes it and throws it away.
Mattie looks around, clearly expecting someone.
EXT. FIELD - DAWN
A man behind a window pane buttons his coat. The window is set in a dark grey wall slowly being sieged by snow.
INT. BEDROOM - DAWN
ETHAN FROME (45), a hale man just past his prime, smooths his coat out against his
body beside the window as he looks out of it. The dirty light streaming through the grimy window illumes him, but the rest of the room, blocked from the light, is shadowy and hazy.
Outside, snow and sky divide the world, but thin wooden fingers poke up from the dividing line.
Ethan leaves the window. Grubby light floods in, revealing part of a cheerless room unsuited to light, and the corner of a bed.
Ethan opens a wardrobe quietly. He takes out another heavy coat with minimal sound, but there are suddenly LOUD BEDSPRING NOISES.
Ethan freezes instantly, but -
ZEENA
Ethan?
Ethan turns around, sheepish and guilty all at the same time.
ETHAN
Sorry.
Not knowing what else to say, Ethan puts on the second coat.
ZEENA FROME (39), dressed in a shapeless nightgown poked out by her gaunt frame, pushes herself up into a sitting position despite PROTESTING BEDSPRING NOISES.
Zeena stares fixedly at Ethan as he dresses. Ethan consciously evades her stare.
Zeena smooths Ethan’s rumpled side of the bed back and forth repeatedly in a grotesque mockery of seduction as she clears her throat.
Ethan looks and instantly looks away, but too late to hide his reaction.
Zeena’s angular hand freezes mid-smooth. Her face paralyzes in a stony expression, but her lips quiver ever so slightly.
Her hand, seemingly disconnected from the rest of her body, gathers up a fistful of bedsheet and twists, even as Ethan smooths out the second coat against his body.
A tense moment passes between husband and wife as Ethan brushes his coat one last time.
Ethan turns towards Zeena, who awkwardly pulls up the fistful of sheet to her chest as if to ward off the cold. She looks away with a clearly hurt expression.
Ethan braces himself, and goes to his wife. Seeing that she will not look at him, he bends over and kisses her head instead.
He turns to go, but Zeena catches his hand. Ethan turns around again. The two of them stare at each other. After an unbearable silence -
ETHAN (CONT'D)
I have to go. The workers -
Zeena’s face freezes. Ethan gently takes her hand from his wrist and touches it to his lips, but as he brings her hand down she reaches with her other hand and caresses his chin.
ZEENA
Stubble. You never shave closely enough.
Zeena lets her hand fall from his face and pulls her other hand from his hold. She sinks back into the bed.
Ethan fingers his chin. He looks at Zeena, who shrugs.
Ethan walks towards the connected bathroom, stops, looks briefly at Zeena, and continues walking.
Zeena watches with petty vindictiveness as Ethan enters the bathroom, turns on the light, and closes the bathroom door.
INT. BATHROOM - DAWN
Ethan tilts his head backwards, jerking it this way and that as he looks at his reflection in the mirror and fingers his chin.
After a while, he suddenly realizes how foolish he looks.
His hand falls slowly, as he tilts his head forwards again.
Ethan looks at himself in the mirror for a long searing moment.
His head falls forwards as his eyes close. An expression of pain and frustration tightens his face as his hands grip the bathroom counter.
BEDSPRING NOISES, MUFFLED.
Ethan looks up instantly. He looks at himself in the mirror one last time, and turns to open the door.
Framed by the doorway, Zeena stands with her arms hanging limply by her side. In one hand she holds an empty cup, and in the other a bottle of pills.
ZEENA
Doctor Hailey gave me these new pills. On account of my health.
She looks directly at him, but Ethan looks away, unable to meet her accusing eyes.
Zeena maintains her defiant gaze for an instant longer, but she too suddenly looks down, and her entire body sags.
After a moment -
ETHAN
I’m sorry, Zee -
ZEENA
Sorry ain’t never any good, Ethan Frome.
Zeena pushes past him into the bathroom. He stands in the threshold of the door, looking at her with a tortured expression as she fills her cup with water.
Without once looking at Ethan, Zeena uncaps the pill bottle, shakes out two pills, puts them on her tongue, swigs a mouthful of water, and throws back her head to swallow the pills.
Zeena caps the pill bottle.
She looks in the mirror for a moment, and then turns to look at Ethan.
Then, abruptly, she sweeps past him out of the bathroom, leaving the bedroom. As she leaves -
ZEENA (CONT'D)
You ain’t leaving without breakfast.
An obstinate expression sets in Ethan’s face. He braces his shoulders as if preparing for battle and goes after Zeena.
A vast tree strains towards the sky, framed against snow so white and reductive that all sense of depth is lost. Glimmering from everything is a pale and faintly purple light, the light of dawn that passes so easily for dusk.
A MURMUR of wind INTENSIFIES slowly, and the smaller and defenseless twigs of the
tree’s crown begin to shiver.
The twigs vibrate, fighting against the relentless wind, until, finally, a TWIG snaps.
It is borne on the currents of the wind. This solid twig drifts and circles in the air as it falls, tossed and turned like a wisp of fluff by an invisible force.
It finally settles on the ground. Only a moment passes, before it is obliterated by A HEAVY BOOT.
A bulk of clothes shaped like a person stands in the snow, the vast tree a short distance away. Only a sliver of face peeks out from underneath the layers, but it is enough to suggest that this figure is one of freezing femininity. This is MATTIE SILVER (23).
Mattie crosses her gloved hands under her armpits as she trembles her way to the tree, her difficulty against the wind betraying a slip of a woman underneath the bulk.
She reaches the tree, and leans against it for a moment. Then she circles the tree, until it shields her against the bitter wind.
Mattie sits down, letting the vast tree support her back. A twig falls on her head, and then onto her lap. She takes it and throws it away.
Mattie looks around, clearly expecting someone.
EXT. FIELD - DAWN
A man behind a window pane buttons his coat. The window is set in a dark grey wall slowly being sieged by snow.
INT. BEDROOM - DAWN
ETHAN FROME (45), a hale man just past his prime, smooths his coat out against his
body beside the window as he looks out of it. The dirty light streaming through the grimy window illumes him, but the rest of the room, blocked from the light, is shadowy and hazy.
Outside, snow and sky divide the world, but thin wooden fingers poke up from the dividing line.
Ethan leaves the window. Grubby light floods in, revealing part of a cheerless room unsuited to light, and the corner of a bed.
Ethan opens a wardrobe quietly. He takes out another heavy coat with minimal sound, but there are suddenly LOUD BEDSPRING NOISES.
Ethan freezes instantly, but -
ZEENA
Ethan?
Ethan turns around, sheepish and guilty all at the same time.
ETHAN
Sorry.
Not knowing what else to say, Ethan puts on the second coat.
ZEENA FROME (39), dressed in a shapeless nightgown poked out by her gaunt frame, pushes herself up into a sitting position despite PROTESTING BEDSPRING NOISES.
Zeena stares fixedly at Ethan as he dresses. Ethan consciously evades her stare.
Zeena smooths Ethan’s rumpled side of the bed back and forth repeatedly in a grotesque mockery of seduction as she clears her throat.
Ethan looks and instantly looks away, but too late to hide his reaction.
Zeena’s angular hand freezes mid-smooth. Her face paralyzes in a stony expression, but her lips quiver ever so slightly.
Her hand, seemingly disconnected from the rest of her body, gathers up a fistful of bedsheet and twists, even as Ethan smooths out the second coat against his body.
A tense moment passes between husband and wife as Ethan brushes his coat one last time.
Ethan turns towards Zeena, who awkwardly pulls up the fistful of sheet to her chest as if to ward off the cold. She looks away with a clearly hurt expression.
Ethan braces himself, and goes to his wife. Seeing that she will not look at him, he bends over and kisses her head instead.
He turns to go, but Zeena catches his hand. Ethan turns around again. The two of them stare at each other. After an unbearable silence -
ETHAN (CONT'D)
I have to go. The workers -
Zeena’s face freezes. Ethan gently takes her hand from his wrist and touches it to his lips, but as he brings her hand down she reaches with her other hand and caresses his chin.
ZEENA
Stubble. You never shave closely enough.
Zeena lets her hand fall from his face and pulls her other hand from his hold. She sinks back into the bed.
Ethan fingers his chin. He looks at Zeena, who shrugs.
Ethan walks towards the connected bathroom, stops, looks briefly at Zeena, and continues walking.
Zeena watches with petty vindictiveness as Ethan enters the bathroom, turns on the light, and closes the bathroom door.
INT. BATHROOM - DAWN
Ethan tilts his head backwards, jerking it this way and that as he looks at his reflection in the mirror and fingers his chin.
After a while, he suddenly realizes how foolish he looks.
His hand falls slowly, as he tilts his head forwards again.
Ethan looks at himself in the mirror for a long searing moment.
His head falls forwards as his eyes close. An expression of pain and frustration tightens his face as his hands grip the bathroom counter.
BEDSPRING NOISES, MUFFLED.
Ethan looks up instantly. He looks at himself in the mirror one last time, and turns to open the door.
Framed by the doorway, Zeena stands with her arms hanging limply by her side. In one hand she holds an empty cup, and in the other a bottle of pills.
ZEENA
Doctor Hailey gave me these new pills. On account of my health.
She looks directly at him, but Ethan looks away, unable to meet her accusing eyes.
Zeena maintains her defiant gaze for an instant longer, but she too suddenly looks down, and her entire body sags.
After a moment -
ETHAN
I’m sorry, Zee -
ZEENA
Sorry ain’t never any good, Ethan Frome.
Zeena pushes past him into the bathroom. He stands in the threshold of the door, looking at her with a tortured expression as she fills her cup with water.
Without once looking at Ethan, Zeena uncaps the pill bottle, shakes out two pills, puts them on her tongue, swigs a mouthful of water, and throws back her head to swallow the pills.
Zeena caps the pill bottle.
She looks in the mirror for a moment, and then turns to look at Ethan.
Then, abruptly, she sweeps past him out of the bathroom, leaving the bedroom. As she leaves -
ZEENA (CONT'D)
You ain’t leaving without breakfast.
An obstinate expression sets in Ethan’s face. He braces his shoulders as if preparing for battle and goes after Zeena.
Screenplay: Family
INT. KITCHEN - DAY
JENNY (45) and RICHARD (49) FENG are sitting at the dining table with their three children, YEN (24), ZACK (21), and JADE (20).
Each member of the family eats in silence, and for a moment only the CLACK OF CHOPSTICKS can be heard as each person, with the exception of Richard, picks cautiously at the slew of shared dishes on the table.
Richard, on the other hand, is attacking the food with gusto and pride.
Yen, Zack, and Jade share sidelong glances as they negotiate the dishes, each one a ‘healthy’ twist on a traditional recipe, such as eggs scrambled with boiled tomatoes.
Jenny valiantly plows on in a show of support.
Richard plucks a piece of boiled chicken deftly with his chopsticks, and puts it on Jade’s bowl of rice. Jade smiles at Richard, and immediately takes a piece too, putting it in Zack’s bowl.
ZACK
Thanks.
RICHARD
(to Jade)
Eat more. So thin how to become Miss World?
JADE
(playfully)
Who says I want to be Miss World?
ZACK
Yeah. It’ll all be over when she gets to the question and answer section anyway.
JADE
You shut up.
(to Richard)
I’m not going to be any Miss World.
RICHARD
If you don’t want to be Miss World what do you want to be?
JADE
Don’t know.
JENNY
She doesn’t want to be anything. All she wants is to laze around at home and watch T.V.
YEN
She wants to be an air stewardess.
Richard frowns at Jade.
RICHARD
Air stewardess?
ZACK
Don’t you have to be, like, of a certain height to become an air stewardess?
JADE
Ay, I got onto the cover of Cleo, okay? If they think I’m tall enough to be a model I don’t see why I’m not tall enough to serve drinks and fluff pillows on a plane.
RICHARD
Air stewardesses don’t earn a lot of money.
JADE
I’m not going to be an air stewardess forever. Just a few years.
RICHARD
What about university? You’re not going to university?
YEN
I think the university will still be there in a few years, Pa.
RICHARD
I’ll ask you what you think when you start paying for her education.
(to Jade)
Why don’t you go to a university here first? Look at your brothers. They’ll -
JADE
Have plenty of options when they get their degrees -
RICHARD
You can try flying afterwards if you like. Didn’t NUS already send you their brochure?
Jenny tries to put a piece of vegetable in Zack’s bowl, but he shakes his head.
JADE
Okay, but if I go to uni first can I stay in a hostel?
Zack smirks into his bowl as Jade kicks him under the table.
RICHARD
We’ll talk about that when you get into NUS.
JADE
Yeah, where have I heard that before.
Zack pushes his chair back with a SCRAPING SOUND and leaves the table with his bowl and utensils, going to the sink. He washes his bowl and utensils, and various cooking ware already in the sink.
JENNY
(to Zack)
Do you want some soup? Your father spent four hours boiling it.
ZACK
Save some for me. I’ll drink it later.
RICHARD
That means you can throw it away.
JENNY
Are you going out?
ZACK
Yeah. I’m going over to Janus’ place. I might be staying over.
RICHARD
Isn’t he the one in Beijing now?
ZACK
No, that’s Calvin. Janus is the one still doing National Service.
RICHARD
Is he the one that you stay over at every weekend?
JENNY
(quickly)
What time are you coming back tomorrow?
ZACK
I’ll be back for breakfast. I’ll buy some soya bean milk too.
JADE
I’m going out later too.
RICHARD
(to Yen)
Where are you going?
YEN
I’m not going anywhere. I think.
JENNY
(to Jade)
Where are you going?
JADE
Out.
RICHARD
Don’t talk to your mother like that.
JADE
What?
JENNY
Where are you going out to?
JADE
Don’t know. Haven’t decided yet.
RICHARD
What’s wrong with staying at home?
JADE
(gesturing to Zack with her chopsticks)
Why aren’t you asking him that?
JENNY
Because he doesn’t come home at 4 a.m. in the morning.
JADE
Yeah. He doesn’t come home at all. Why can’t I stay over at my friend’s place?
RICHARD
Because you’re a girl.
JADE
Pa, I love you, but sometimes you’re full of shit.
Jade pushes her chair out with a SCRAPING SOUND.
RICHARD
Sit down and finish your food.
Jade remains standing, and shovels the rice in her bowl into her mouth quickly. She shows the empty bowl to Richard, goes to the sink, and dumps her bowl and utensils in it for Zack to clean. As she walks by the table on her way to her room -
JENNY
And don’t think I don’t know you’re still smoking.
Jade exits the kitchen.
JENNY (CONT'D)
(to Richard)
I’m telling you, your daughter -
YEN
Ma, don’t.
Zack finishes, and wipes his hands on his shorts. He walks by the table on the way to his room, and exits the kitchen.
An awkward moment passes as Yen, Jenny, and Richard eat quietly, Richard now attacking the food with not so much gusto as with anger.
JENNY
(to Yen)
How’s work at the office?
YEN
It’s okay.
(a brief pause)
It’s tiring, actually.
Zack pokes his head into the kitchen.
ZACK
I’m going now. Bye, Ma. Bye, Pa.
JENNY
Bye-bye.
Jenny gives Richard a look. Richard remains silent. Zack waits an instant more, and then leaves.
A few moments pass, and then a door in the distance OPENS AND CLOSES.
A few moments later, A TELEVISION SHOW BLARES.
RICHARD
(bellowing)
TURN THAT THING DOWN. ARE YOU DEAF?
The BLARE quietens, but still remains CLEARLY AUDIBLE.
Yen goes to the rice cooker and scoops out another bowl of rice.
YEN
By the way, I have to go to work early tomorrow. And they also want me to work late for the next couple of weeks.
RICHARD
They’re not paying you enough, if you ask me. Always asking this and that.
YEN
Yeah.
Yen comes back to the table and sits down, picking at the dishes with something approximating enthusiasm.
YEN (CONT'D)
It’s especially bad now, because they like to test the scholars during our last attachment before they decide where to post us permanently after we get back.
RICHARD
You better make sure you don’t screw up then.
JENNY
And make sure you get first class honors. I’ll buy some birds nest for you to take back to America. Drink before your exams; it’s very good for your brain.
YEN
Yeah.
Yen takes a piece of meat and puts it in Richard’s bowl.
YEN (CONT'D)
So I was thinking... maybe for the next couple of weeks I can just stay with a friend who lives near SPH.
Jenny and Richard stop eating.
YEN (CONT'D)
It’s just for the next few weeks. It makes no sense for me to leave from here so early and come back so late - I’ll be tired out during work.
RICHARD
What do you think this house is? A hotel?
YEN
That’s not at all what I meant.
JENNY
Yen...
RICHARD
You’re only back for ten weeks and you can’t even spend ten lousy weeks with your family?
YEN
I just think -
RICHARD
We’re not discussing this anymore. You’re not “staying over at a friend’s place”. It’s not fair to me, and it’s not fair to your mother.
Yen looks to Jenny.
JENNY
Yen, please. Is it the room? I know it’s bad that you have to share a room with Zack, but I can get you a better mattress and -
RICHARD
Stop it.
YEN
Okay. Forget it. Forget that I said anything. I’ll stay here until I fly back to Columbia.
Yen picks more food from the dishes and eats quietly. Jenny places a placating hand on Richard’s arm as the latter stares at Yen resentfully, Yen pretending not to see.
Richard tries to continue eating, but he can’t. He puts his bowl and chopsticks down with almost scary control, as though he is on the verge of snapping.
RICHARD
I don’t -
YEN
It’s okay. Let’s not talk about it anymore.
Yen pushes his chair back with a SCRAPE, goes to the rubbish bin, and empties his bowl. He dumps his bowl and utensils into the sink.
Yen goes back to the table, and pushes in his own chair, as well as Zack’s and Jade’s. He leaves the kitchen.
JENNY
It’s not -
Richard shakes his head. He remains in his chair for a moment, and then he gets up, and takes one of the dishes. He goes to the rubbish bin, wipes all of the food into the bin, and puts the plate into the sink.
He disposes of every single dish in the same way. When the last dish is emptied, Richard remains standing at the bin with the last empty plate, his back to Jenny.
Jenny gets up and goes to the sink. She takes a dish rag from the sink and returns to the table, wiping it down. Then she replaces the rag, and goes to the Richard. She hugs him from behind, as he wraps his hands around her encircling arms.
JENNY (45) and RICHARD (49) FENG are sitting at the dining table with their three children, YEN (24), ZACK (21), and JADE (20).
Each member of the family eats in silence, and for a moment only the CLACK OF CHOPSTICKS can be heard as each person, with the exception of Richard, picks cautiously at the slew of shared dishes on the table.
Richard, on the other hand, is attacking the food with gusto and pride.
Yen, Zack, and Jade share sidelong glances as they negotiate the dishes, each one a ‘healthy’ twist on a traditional recipe, such as eggs scrambled with boiled tomatoes.
Jenny valiantly plows on in a show of support.
Richard plucks a piece of boiled chicken deftly with his chopsticks, and puts it on Jade’s bowl of rice. Jade smiles at Richard, and immediately takes a piece too, putting it in Zack’s bowl.
ZACK
Thanks.
RICHARD
(to Jade)
Eat more. So thin how to become Miss World?
JADE
(playfully)
Who says I want to be Miss World?
ZACK
Yeah. It’ll all be over when she gets to the question and answer section anyway.
JADE
You shut up.
(to Richard)
I’m not going to be any Miss World.
RICHARD
If you don’t want to be Miss World what do you want to be?
JADE
Don’t know.
JENNY
She doesn’t want to be anything. All she wants is to laze around at home and watch T.V.
YEN
She wants to be an air stewardess.
Richard frowns at Jade.
RICHARD
Air stewardess?
ZACK
Don’t you have to be, like, of a certain height to become an air stewardess?
JADE
Ay, I got onto the cover of Cleo, okay? If they think I’m tall enough to be a model I don’t see why I’m not tall enough to serve drinks and fluff pillows on a plane.
RICHARD
Air stewardesses don’t earn a lot of money.
JADE
I’m not going to be an air stewardess forever. Just a few years.
RICHARD
What about university? You’re not going to university?
YEN
I think the university will still be there in a few years, Pa.
RICHARD
I’ll ask you what you think when you start paying for her education.
(to Jade)
Why don’t you go to a university here first? Look at your brothers. They’ll -
JADE
Have plenty of options when they get their degrees -
RICHARD
You can try flying afterwards if you like. Didn’t NUS already send you their brochure?
Jenny tries to put a piece of vegetable in Zack’s bowl, but he shakes his head.
JADE
Okay, but if I go to uni first can I stay in a hostel?
Zack smirks into his bowl as Jade kicks him under the table.
RICHARD
We’ll talk about that when you get into NUS.
JADE
Yeah, where have I heard that before.
Zack pushes his chair back with a SCRAPING SOUND and leaves the table with his bowl and utensils, going to the sink. He washes his bowl and utensils, and various cooking ware already in the sink.
JENNY
(to Zack)
Do you want some soup? Your father spent four hours boiling it.
ZACK
Save some for me. I’ll drink it later.
RICHARD
That means you can throw it away.
JENNY
Are you going out?
ZACK
Yeah. I’m going over to Janus’ place. I might be staying over.
RICHARD
Isn’t he the one in Beijing now?
ZACK
No, that’s Calvin. Janus is the one still doing National Service.
RICHARD
Is he the one that you stay over at every weekend?
JENNY
(quickly)
What time are you coming back tomorrow?
ZACK
I’ll be back for breakfast. I’ll buy some soya bean milk too.
JADE
I’m going out later too.
RICHARD
(to Yen)
Where are you going?
YEN
I’m not going anywhere. I think.
JENNY
(to Jade)
Where are you going?
JADE
Out.
RICHARD
Don’t talk to your mother like that.
JADE
What?
JENNY
Where are you going out to?
JADE
Don’t know. Haven’t decided yet.
RICHARD
What’s wrong with staying at home?
JADE
(gesturing to Zack with her chopsticks)
Why aren’t you asking him that?
JENNY
Because he doesn’t come home at 4 a.m. in the morning.
JADE
Yeah. He doesn’t come home at all. Why can’t I stay over at my friend’s place?
RICHARD
Because you’re a girl.
JADE
Pa, I love you, but sometimes you’re full of shit.
Jade pushes her chair out with a SCRAPING SOUND.
RICHARD
Sit down and finish your food.
Jade remains standing, and shovels the rice in her bowl into her mouth quickly. She shows the empty bowl to Richard, goes to the sink, and dumps her bowl and utensils in it for Zack to clean. As she walks by the table on her way to her room -
JENNY
And don’t think I don’t know you’re still smoking.
Jade exits the kitchen.
JENNY (CONT'D)
(to Richard)
I’m telling you, your daughter -
YEN
Ma, don’t.
Zack finishes, and wipes his hands on his shorts. He walks by the table on the way to his room, and exits the kitchen.
An awkward moment passes as Yen, Jenny, and Richard eat quietly, Richard now attacking the food with not so much gusto as with anger.
JENNY
(to Yen)
How’s work at the office?
YEN
It’s okay.
(a brief pause)
It’s tiring, actually.
Zack pokes his head into the kitchen.
ZACK
I’m going now. Bye, Ma. Bye, Pa.
JENNY
Bye-bye.
Jenny gives Richard a look. Richard remains silent. Zack waits an instant more, and then leaves.
A few moments pass, and then a door in the distance OPENS AND CLOSES.
A few moments later, A TELEVISION SHOW BLARES.
RICHARD
(bellowing)
TURN THAT THING DOWN. ARE YOU DEAF?
The BLARE quietens, but still remains CLEARLY AUDIBLE.
Yen goes to the rice cooker and scoops out another bowl of rice.
YEN
By the way, I have to go to work early tomorrow. And they also want me to work late for the next couple of weeks.
RICHARD
They’re not paying you enough, if you ask me. Always asking this and that.
YEN
Yeah.
Yen comes back to the table and sits down, picking at the dishes with something approximating enthusiasm.
YEN (CONT'D)
It’s especially bad now, because they like to test the scholars during our last attachment before they decide where to post us permanently after we get back.
RICHARD
You better make sure you don’t screw up then.
JENNY
And make sure you get first class honors. I’ll buy some birds nest for you to take back to America. Drink before your exams; it’s very good for your brain.
YEN
Yeah.
Yen takes a piece of meat and puts it in Richard’s bowl.
YEN (CONT'D)
So I was thinking... maybe for the next couple of weeks I can just stay with a friend who lives near SPH.
Jenny and Richard stop eating.
YEN (CONT'D)
It’s just for the next few weeks. It makes no sense for me to leave from here so early and come back so late - I’ll be tired out during work.
RICHARD
What do you think this house is? A hotel?
YEN
That’s not at all what I meant.
JENNY
Yen...
RICHARD
You’re only back for ten weeks and you can’t even spend ten lousy weeks with your family?
YEN
I just think -
RICHARD
We’re not discussing this anymore. You’re not “staying over at a friend’s place”. It’s not fair to me, and it’s not fair to your mother.
Yen looks to Jenny.
JENNY
Yen, please. Is it the room? I know it’s bad that you have to share a room with Zack, but I can get you a better mattress and -
RICHARD
Stop it.
YEN
Okay. Forget it. Forget that I said anything. I’ll stay here until I fly back to Columbia.
Yen picks more food from the dishes and eats quietly. Jenny places a placating hand on Richard’s arm as the latter stares at Yen resentfully, Yen pretending not to see.
Richard tries to continue eating, but he can’t. He puts his bowl and chopsticks down with almost scary control, as though he is on the verge of snapping.
RICHARD
I don’t -
YEN
It’s okay. Let’s not talk about it anymore.
Yen pushes his chair back with a SCRAPE, goes to the rubbish bin, and empties his bowl. He dumps his bowl and utensils into the sink.
Yen goes back to the table, and pushes in his own chair, as well as Zack’s and Jade’s. He leaves the kitchen.
JENNY
It’s not -
Richard shakes his head. He remains in his chair for a moment, and then he gets up, and takes one of the dishes. He goes to the rubbish bin, wipes all of the food into the bin, and puts the plate into the sink.
He disposes of every single dish in the same way. When the last dish is emptied, Richard remains standing at the bin with the last empty plate, his back to Jenny.
Jenny gets up and goes to the sink. She takes a dish rag from the sink and returns to the table, wiping it down. Then she replaces the rag, and goes to the Richard. She hugs him from behind, as he wraps his hands around her encircling arms.
Play: A Common Language
ELIZABETH is packing her suitcase, her back to EDDIE as he watches her.
EDDIE
You’re really leaving.
ELIZABETH
Yeah.
EDDIE
So. This is it.
ELIZABETH
Yeah.
EDDIE
You’re just going to walk out the door with your suitcase –
ELIZABETH
(frustrated) Yes!
Elizabeth turns to look at Eddie.
ELIZABETH (CONT’D)
Yes, I’m just gonna walk out the door with my suitcase. What else did you think was going to happen?
A pause.
EDDIE
Fine. Go.
ELIZABETH
Don’t make this my fault.
EDDIE
Are you saying that it’s mine?
ELIZABETH
You told the whole of Manhattan that I was screwing the milkman!
EDDIE
You were!
ELIZABETH
(stares) Okay, you know what, forget it. Whatever. I’m not doing this.
Elizabeth turns back to her suitcase.
EDDIE
In case you’ve forgotten, you were sleeping with the milkman. I caught you.
Elizabeth turns back to him.
ELIZABETH
So that makes it okay for you to broadcast it over the radio? (shaking her head) You know what? Fuck you, Eddie. You’ve been standing there watching me pack for ten fucking minutes and I haven’t heard you say a single fucking sorry. You’re a piece of work.
EDDIE
What do you want from me? Sorry? Why should I apologize? Did you apologize when I walked in on you… servicing the milkman? Even if I was wrong in telling everyone, I was telling the truth.
ELIZABETH
What are you, five? There’s honesty, and then there’s honesty. When I ask you whether my ass looks big in that stupid dress you bought for me, did you say yes? When Robbie asks you ‘How’s it going’ at five a.m. in the morning, do you say ‘fuck you’? No. You said my ass looked great, and you tell Robbie that ‘it’s going fine’. You don’t have a problem lying to me, and you don’t have a problem lying to Robbie, but five million anonymous Manhattanites and you suddenly have to tell the truth? Gimme a break.
EDDIE
Five million Manhattanites didn’t cheat on me. You did.
ELIZABETH
Oh, so it’s not about “the truth” then. It was just about getting revenge. Just so we’re clear.
Eddie is silent. Elizabeth turns back to packing her suitcase.
EDDIE
All right! I’m sorry. Is that what you want? I’m sorry.
Elizabeth pauses.
ELIZABETH
It’s – It’s too late.
EDDIE
You’re not serious. What else do you want from me? I’ve already said that I’m sorry. And let’s not forget that I’m not the only one here who’s made a mistake. I still haven’t heard you apologize for –
ELIZABETH
Fucking the milkman. Yes. I remember. (pause) I’m sorry.
EDDIE
All – all right.
Elizabeth continues packing.
EDDIE (CONT’D)
What are you doing?
ELIZABETH
What does it look like?
EDDIE
Why are you doing this?
ELIZABETH
I told you. It’s too late.
EDDIE
What does that even mean? Why – Stop it. Just – Just – stop!
Eddie pulls Elizabeth away from the suitcase.
EDDIE (CONT’D)
What do you want me to do? Do you want me to make a public apology? Say I was just kidding? What do you want me to do?
ELIZABETH
Nothing. This just isn’t working. It hasn’t been working. I want out.
EDDIE
You want out. You. Want. Out. What the fuck gives you the right to say that? You can’t just want out. What about me? What about what I want?
ELIZABETH
What do you want?
EDDIE
What’s that supposed to mean?
ELIZABETH
– Nothing.
EDDIE
No. You can’t ask a question like that and then say “nothing”. What, Liz? What did you mean by that?
ELIZABETH
I meant, what do you want? You go to work way earlier than you need to, you don’t come back until late at night –
EDDIE
I’m a hard worker –
ELIZABETH
Okay. If you say so.
Elizabeth goes back to packing. A pause.
EDDIE
I’m not having an affair.
ELIZABETH
God, Eddie! What the fuck is the matter with you? Why do all men think that they’re only cheating if they fuck someone else?
Elizabeth pauses.
EDDIE
I don’t understand.
Elizabeth turns to Eddie.
ELIZABETH
I can’t do this anymore. I barely see you as it is, and when you come back all you do is sit in the kitchen and work on your stupid little phrases –
EDDIE
I’m in radio, Lizzy. Those words are all that I’ve got –
ELIZABETH
Yeah. You work and work to get the words right for your show, but you can’t even spare one for me.
EDDIE
That’s not true.
ELIZABETH
Yeah? “What are you doing?” “Just some work.” “Do you want to go and get something to eat?” “Yeah, sure.” Those aren’t words, Eddie. They’re excuses not to talk.
Eddie is silent.
ELIZABETH (CONT’D)
Okay then.
Elizabeth turns and shuts the suitcase. She pulls the suitcase onto the ground.
ELIZABETH
See you around.
Elizabeth turns to go.
EDDIE
I’m in radio, Lizzy.
Elizabeth starts to go.
EDDIE (CONT’D)
Wait – wait.
Elizabeth turns to him.
EDDIE (CONT’D)
I’m in radio. I go to work every day, and I sit at a desk, and I read words from pieces of paper. Sometimes those words are mine, sometimes they’re shills from the higher-ups at the station, but it’s not me. The person you hear on the radio talking about how great Mariah Carey’s comeback album is? That’s not me. The guy who just loves that we’re going to get two to four inches of snow this winter? That’s not me either. Don’t you understand? When I go to work, I have to watch what I say, I have to pick and choose every single word I use and make sure that it’s okay for the public ear. Do you know what that does to a person after ten years?
ELIZABETH
Huh.
EDDIE
You think I don’t love you? I do. But it’s not – just – love. Sometimes it’s mixed with hate. Sometimes there’s frustration or annoyance. Sometimes I love you because you get on my nerves. It’s not – it’s not easy. And I don’t want to lie to you. I don’t want to tell you that I love you, because you might think you know what I mean, when it’s not what I mean at all, and then you’ll get angry at me because you think I was just lying to you. So I don’t say anything. But I do love you. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t love you.
Silence.
ELIZABETH
Why didn’t you tell me this before?
EDDIE
Why didn’t you tell me what you were feeling before?
ELIZABETH
I – I don’t know. I thought. (pause) What if it’s not enough?
EDDIE
What if what’s not enough?
ELIZABETH
This. All of this love is great and all, but what if it’s not enough? What happens after this?
EDDIE
I don’t know.
ELIZABETH
Sometimes I thought about telling you, but then I always thought, what happens next? Yes, you love me, and yes, I – well, I like you, but then what? What if we have nothing to say after that? We’re too old to sit around all night just telling each other how much we like or love each other, and I don’t want to be one of those married couples –
EDDIE
Who go out for dinner at a lovely restaurant because it’s Thursday night?
ELIZABETH
Something like that. I can’t do that either. What if “I love you” is the only common language that we have?
Silence.
ELIZABETH (CONT’D)
I’m sorry. I’m not – I’m not very romantic. I might still love you, but I’m too tired to keep this going. Maybe it’s time.
EDDIE
Why don’t you just tell me what to do.
ELIZABETH
I like you, but I have my pride, Eddie. I can’t always make the first move.
Elizabeth walks forward and touches Eddie’s face.
ELIZABETH (CONT’D)
Let’s just – not be together for a while, and see how that goes.
Elizabeth turns, takes her suitcase, and walks towards the door.
EDDIE
Let’s go out for a movie.
Elizabeth stops, and turns to look at Eddie, somewhat smiling.
ELIZABETH
A movie?
EDDIE
It’s not dinner. Not yet anyway – I figure that we should just do a movie for the first date.
ELIZABETH
Huh.
EDDIE
You’re right. Maybe we don’t know each other anymore. Maybe we – maybe we never even did. And you’re also right – maybe we have nothing in common, or at least nothing in common right now, other than I love you, or in your case, I like you. But if we go out for a movie, and then another, maybe a drink, maybe dinner sometime, we can start adding words to our common language. Sentences, even. “Yeah, it reminded me of that movie too.” “Let’s go to that sushi place again.” Things like that.
Elizabeth is undecided.
EDDIE (CONT’D)
Come on. I’m making the first move. I’m trying here.
A moment. Elizabeth walks to Eddie, and holds out a hand for him to shake.
ELIZABETH
Elizabeth Alison Abrams.
Eddie shakes her hand.
EDDIE
Edward Rudolph King.
ELIZABETH
I honestly don’t know which is worse, Rudolph, or that your initials spell ERK.
EDDIE
(smiling) Someone I know told me that once. Shall we go catch a movie?
ELIZABETH
Sure.
EDDIE
You’re really leaving.
ELIZABETH
Yeah.
EDDIE
So. This is it.
ELIZABETH
Yeah.
EDDIE
You’re just going to walk out the door with your suitcase –
ELIZABETH
(frustrated) Yes!
Elizabeth turns to look at Eddie.
ELIZABETH (CONT’D)
Yes, I’m just gonna walk out the door with my suitcase. What else did you think was going to happen?
A pause.
EDDIE
Fine. Go.
ELIZABETH
Don’t make this my fault.
EDDIE
Are you saying that it’s mine?
ELIZABETH
You told the whole of Manhattan that I was screwing the milkman!
EDDIE
You were!
ELIZABETH
(stares) Okay, you know what, forget it. Whatever. I’m not doing this.
Elizabeth turns back to her suitcase.
EDDIE
In case you’ve forgotten, you were sleeping with the milkman. I caught you.
Elizabeth turns back to him.
ELIZABETH
So that makes it okay for you to broadcast it over the radio? (shaking her head) You know what? Fuck you, Eddie. You’ve been standing there watching me pack for ten fucking minutes and I haven’t heard you say a single fucking sorry. You’re a piece of work.
EDDIE
What do you want from me? Sorry? Why should I apologize? Did you apologize when I walked in on you… servicing the milkman? Even if I was wrong in telling everyone, I was telling the truth.
ELIZABETH
What are you, five? There’s honesty, and then there’s honesty. When I ask you whether my ass looks big in that stupid dress you bought for me, did you say yes? When Robbie asks you ‘How’s it going’ at five a.m. in the morning, do you say ‘fuck you’? No. You said my ass looked great, and you tell Robbie that ‘it’s going fine’. You don’t have a problem lying to me, and you don’t have a problem lying to Robbie, but five million anonymous Manhattanites and you suddenly have to tell the truth? Gimme a break.
EDDIE
Five million Manhattanites didn’t cheat on me. You did.
ELIZABETH
Oh, so it’s not about “the truth” then. It was just about getting revenge. Just so we’re clear.
Eddie is silent. Elizabeth turns back to packing her suitcase.
EDDIE
All right! I’m sorry. Is that what you want? I’m sorry.
Elizabeth pauses.
ELIZABETH
It’s – It’s too late.
EDDIE
You’re not serious. What else do you want from me? I’ve already said that I’m sorry. And let’s not forget that I’m not the only one here who’s made a mistake. I still haven’t heard you apologize for –
ELIZABETH
Fucking the milkman. Yes. I remember. (pause) I’m sorry.
EDDIE
All – all right.
Elizabeth continues packing.
EDDIE (CONT’D)
What are you doing?
ELIZABETH
What does it look like?
EDDIE
Why are you doing this?
ELIZABETH
I told you. It’s too late.
EDDIE
What does that even mean? Why – Stop it. Just – Just – stop!
Eddie pulls Elizabeth away from the suitcase.
EDDIE (CONT’D)
What do you want me to do? Do you want me to make a public apology? Say I was just kidding? What do you want me to do?
ELIZABETH
Nothing. This just isn’t working. It hasn’t been working. I want out.
EDDIE
You want out. You. Want. Out. What the fuck gives you the right to say that? You can’t just want out. What about me? What about what I want?
ELIZABETH
What do you want?
EDDIE
What’s that supposed to mean?
ELIZABETH
– Nothing.
EDDIE
No. You can’t ask a question like that and then say “nothing”. What, Liz? What did you mean by that?
ELIZABETH
I meant, what do you want? You go to work way earlier than you need to, you don’t come back until late at night –
EDDIE
I’m a hard worker –
ELIZABETH
Okay. If you say so.
Elizabeth goes back to packing. A pause.
EDDIE
I’m not having an affair.
ELIZABETH
God, Eddie! What the fuck is the matter with you? Why do all men think that they’re only cheating if they fuck someone else?
Elizabeth pauses.
EDDIE
I don’t understand.
Elizabeth turns to Eddie.
ELIZABETH
I can’t do this anymore. I barely see you as it is, and when you come back all you do is sit in the kitchen and work on your stupid little phrases –
EDDIE
I’m in radio, Lizzy. Those words are all that I’ve got –
ELIZABETH
Yeah. You work and work to get the words right for your show, but you can’t even spare one for me.
EDDIE
That’s not true.
ELIZABETH
Yeah? “What are you doing?” “Just some work.” “Do you want to go and get something to eat?” “Yeah, sure.” Those aren’t words, Eddie. They’re excuses not to talk.
Eddie is silent.
ELIZABETH (CONT’D)
Okay then.
Elizabeth turns and shuts the suitcase. She pulls the suitcase onto the ground.
ELIZABETH
See you around.
Elizabeth turns to go.
EDDIE
I’m in radio, Lizzy.
Elizabeth starts to go.
EDDIE (CONT’D)
Wait – wait.
Elizabeth turns to him.
EDDIE (CONT’D)
I’m in radio. I go to work every day, and I sit at a desk, and I read words from pieces of paper. Sometimes those words are mine, sometimes they’re shills from the higher-ups at the station, but it’s not me. The person you hear on the radio talking about how great Mariah Carey’s comeback album is? That’s not me. The guy who just loves that we’re going to get two to four inches of snow this winter? That’s not me either. Don’t you understand? When I go to work, I have to watch what I say, I have to pick and choose every single word I use and make sure that it’s okay for the public ear. Do you know what that does to a person after ten years?
ELIZABETH
Huh.
EDDIE
You think I don’t love you? I do. But it’s not – just – love. Sometimes it’s mixed with hate. Sometimes there’s frustration or annoyance. Sometimes I love you because you get on my nerves. It’s not – it’s not easy. And I don’t want to lie to you. I don’t want to tell you that I love you, because you might think you know what I mean, when it’s not what I mean at all, and then you’ll get angry at me because you think I was just lying to you. So I don’t say anything. But I do love you. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t love you.
Silence.
ELIZABETH
Why didn’t you tell me this before?
EDDIE
Why didn’t you tell me what you were feeling before?
ELIZABETH
I – I don’t know. I thought. (pause) What if it’s not enough?
EDDIE
What if what’s not enough?
ELIZABETH
This. All of this love is great and all, but what if it’s not enough? What happens after this?
EDDIE
I don’t know.
ELIZABETH
Sometimes I thought about telling you, but then I always thought, what happens next? Yes, you love me, and yes, I – well, I like you, but then what? What if we have nothing to say after that? We’re too old to sit around all night just telling each other how much we like or love each other, and I don’t want to be one of those married couples –
EDDIE
Who go out for dinner at a lovely restaurant because it’s Thursday night?
ELIZABETH
Something like that. I can’t do that either. What if “I love you” is the only common language that we have?
Silence.
ELIZABETH (CONT’D)
I’m sorry. I’m not – I’m not very romantic. I might still love you, but I’m too tired to keep this going. Maybe it’s time.
EDDIE
Why don’t you just tell me what to do.
ELIZABETH
I like you, but I have my pride, Eddie. I can’t always make the first move.
Elizabeth walks forward and touches Eddie’s face.
ELIZABETH (CONT’D)
Let’s just – not be together for a while, and see how that goes.
Elizabeth turns, takes her suitcase, and walks towards the door.
EDDIE
Let’s go out for a movie.
Elizabeth stops, and turns to look at Eddie, somewhat smiling.
ELIZABETH
A movie?
EDDIE
It’s not dinner. Not yet anyway – I figure that we should just do a movie for the first date.
ELIZABETH
Huh.
EDDIE
You’re right. Maybe we don’t know each other anymore. Maybe we – maybe we never even did. And you’re also right – maybe we have nothing in common, or at least nothing in common right now, other than I love you, or in your case, I like you. But if we go out for a movie, and then another, maybe a drink, maybe dinner sometime, we can start adding words to our common language. Sentences, even. “Yeah, it reminded me of that movie too.” “Let’s go to that sushi place again.” Things like that.
Elizabeth is undecided.
EDDIE (CONT’D)
Come on. I’m making the first move. I’m trying here.
A moment. Elizabeth walks to Eddie, and holds out a hand for him to shake.
ELIZABETH
Elizabeth Alison Abrams.
Eddie shakes her hand.
EDDIE
Edward Rudolph King.
ELIZABETH
I honestly don’t know which is worse, Rudolph, or that your initials spell ERK.
EDDIE
(smiling) Someone I know told me that once. Shall we go catch a movie?
ELIZABETH
Sure.
Play: The Index
An office. KENNY (49) sits at his desk, reading a newspaper. DAVID (27) sits at his desk, tapping at a laptop.
DAVID
(in an ‘I’m actually doing it” voice) I’m refreshing.
KENNY
(disinterested) Yeah, you’re just missing a flower in your hair. (silence) What, no comeback? Disappointing, kid.
DAVID
Always assume I’m saying ‘fuck you’ on the inside, sir.
KENNY
At least d/l some porn if you’re going to be fucking around with that all day. (beat) ChixMix isn’t flagged yet, I think.
DAVID
(announcing) One hundred and forty-seven. I told you! – Sir.
As Kenny walks to David’s desk to peer at the laptop screen –
KENNY
That’s not so bad. At least we’re on the list –
DAVID
We’re better off not on it. We’re below Congo and Bhutan.
KENNY
We’re above Iraq.
DAVID
By one place. You got a way to spin that too?
As Kenny goes back to his desk –
KENNY
I told you, kid. We got it covered. Geez. Switch to boxers.
DAVID
You’ve got a 40 cm letter criticizing the government running with a 20 cm report on our Press Freedom Index ranking. Am I right? (silence) You don’t think somebody out there is going to go (puts finger to lip) “Hmm, I wonder whether this is a set-up?”.
KENNY
(already reading his newspaper) No. I don’t think anyone will actually take the time to be that gay. Besides, we got a full-page pet the dog on Tuesday too. (P.R. voice) “The RSF index is based largely on a different media model which favors the advocacy and adversarial role of the press. Singapore's media model is different. Our model is that of a free and responsible press whose role is to report news accurately and objectively to Singaporeans.” (normal voice) Throw in the A.T. Kearney Globalization Index number, get the Jones Lang LaSalle Survey in a sidebar, and it’ll aaaaall be good.
DAVID
(under his breath, but clearly meant for Kenny to hear) Yeah, you got it “aaaaall” lubed up, haven’t you?
KENNY
(with a tinge of warning) You see any riots in the past few years? Rebels storming our offices?
DAVID
No, but –
KENNY
Singapore Inc. still spiking the charts?
DAVID
That’s not –
KENNY
So what’s your problem, kid?
DAVID
I just don’t think rebuttals slash pet the dogs are gonna cut anymore. (beat) We’ve had a really bad P.R. year – Tisch declined us –
KENNY
Never reported.
DAVID
The Warwick campus voted against us –
KENNY
(bored) It’s the British. Nobody cares.
DAVID
The Nguyen hanging pissed off the human rights group, the anti-death penalty camp, and the Australians –
KENNY
Mr. Nguyen knew of our nation’s zero tolerance of heroin –
DAVID
A*Star debacle, bloggers jailed, walkover Presidential election –
KENNY
Defamation, sedition, disqualification. All perfectly legal –
DAVID
Exactly. All legal. Michael Fay was legal, and how much ass did we have to kiss after that bit of law?
KENNY
(annoyed, putting down his newspaper) Kid. You gotta plan, spill it.
DAVID
A Speakers’ Corner.
KENNY
The London one? Here?
DAVID
It’s not rewriting the Constitution. (beat) It’s good P.R. –
KENNY
(nodding) No. No, you’re right – Free Speech and everything –
DAVID
We just need to find a place –
KENNY
I know exactly where –
DAVID
(forestalling) Somewhere central –
KENNY
(with relish) Hong Kee Park.
Dead silence.
DAVID
That’s so far west it’s practically in Malaysia. No-one’s –
KENNY
(P.R. voice) It’ll weed out the determinedly nationalistic from the merely above apathetic –
DAVID
(viciously) It’s a joke!
KENNY
Kid. (beat) You wanna change the system?
DAVID
Yes –
KENNY
You wanna do it more easily from inside the system?
DAVID
You’re not –
KENNY
Then you’ll have to stay employed in the system, won’t you?
DAVID
That’s not right.
KENNY
David, David, David. Do you really think you’re the first person to come in here all poofed up with your grand ideals –
DAVID
At least I have some ideals –
KENNY
You got any close Malay friends, David? (silence) Talk to Ahmed? – He’s the elevator guy. (silence) Lisa, the lesbian coffee girl –
DAVID
I get it –
KENNY
No. You don’t. (gently) You’re new, so you getta pass, but sometimes the problem with people like you, David, is that you look at other people and you don’t see other people. You see causes, and that’s not what we do. We’re about the people –
DAVID
(bursting out) I’m gay.
KENNY
(beat) I know. (beat) I knew. (beat) It’s the hair. (beat) You want a hug?
DAVID
You talk about us being about the people. I’m the people. What have you done for me?
KENNY
I tabled the repeal of ‘Law 69’. I think that’s pretty big for you, don’t you?
DAVID
(obstinately) The difference between us, Kenny, is that if I accidentally ‘gay up’ in public, or if some scoop-hungry journo catches me at the wrong place at the wrong time –
KENNY
Don’t be dramatic. You won’t be fired –
DAVID
I won’t get nearly enough votes at the next General Elections.
KENNY
Exactly. We’re doing the best we can under the circumstances. We close an eye to the gays, lesbians, trannies, Malays, pros, pimps, rec druggies and a whole lotta other people because we know better. But the vast majority of people out there don’t, so we leave a few stupid laws in the Constitution to keep ‘em happy. Sure, it’s not a perfect system, and there’ll always be a few angry people with axes to grind, but if everyone mostly gets to do what they like –
DAVID
Stop it. Stop talking. You do these things with words – (idealistic crusade) I’m not as well-greased as you, sir, but that isn’t tolerance. It’s avert-your-eyes, sweep-under-the-carpet, deliberate blindness, and every day that a perfectly good article gets pulled because it crosses some “sensitive” O.B. marker is another day that we get a little more blind –
KENNY
You don’t get it –
DAVID
We should be educating them –
KENNY
(wearily) People don’t want to be educated, Dave. People don’t get blinder because articles get pulled. They get blinder because they want to –
DAVID
(passionately) Then we should be making it impossible for them to ignore –
KENNY
Then how are you any different from the people you despise?
Dead silence.
DAVID
(an effort at calmness) I just think that we should be moving forwards to some sort of balance, as opposed to ignoring –
KENNY
Do you know what happens to people with agendas, David? They get ignored. It doesn’t matter how reasonable or logical you are, because as long as you’ve got an axe to grind –
DAVID
Then you should speak for us –
KENNY
(angrily) What the fuck do you think I have been doing? You talk about change like it’s a piece of magic that happens once the ink is dry. (wearily) Do you know what will happen if I do what you say? By tomorrow afternoon everyone on this floor will be canned and by tomorrow evening everything I’ve worked for in the past twelve years will be gone, just like that. Change doesn’t work the way you dream it does. It’s not fiery revolution. It’s an invisible, uncredited, slog. It’s one word here, a few more seconds of a T.V. show there, and maybe one person every few months – if we’re lucky – who starts asking a few more questions. (beat) And yes, sometimes it’s about making a proposal or floating a law that you hate, either because it’ll getcha a favor down the road, or because it’s so disgusting that you hope a few people out there will go, “What the fuck is this?”. That’s how change works.
Kenny stops. A beat, then –
DAVID
(gently) Yeah, but you fuck around with the wrong people too many times and you never get clean… Kenny.
KENNY
(beat) You ‘straightened’ yourself up to get the votes, didn’t you? (beat) It’s a revolving door here cause people don’t like getting really down and dirty, David, and they don’t like backstage work. (A pause, then wearily) It’s the only way to get things done. The only way. (beat) Right now, Singapore is a place that will break your heart if you care. And if you get tired, or if you can’t cut it, then you shouldn’t be here.
David and Kenny are silent for a long moment. Then –
DAVID
Hong Kee Park. (beat) But I want that favor down the road.
KENNY
(beat, then acknowledging) Draw up a proposal, and we’ll talk.
DAVID
(in an ‘I’m actually doing it” voice) I’m refreshing.
KENNY
(disinterested) Yeah, you’re just missing a flower in your hair. (silence) What, no comeback? Disappointing, kid.
DAVID
Always assume I’m saying ‘fuck you’ on the inside, sir.
KENNY
At least d/l some porn if you’re going to be fucking around with that all day. (beat) ChixMix isn’t flagged yet, I think.
DAVID
(announcing) One hundred and forty-seven. I told you! – Sir.
As Kenny walks to David’s desk to peer at the laptop screen –
KENNY
That’s not so bad. At least we’re on the list –
DAVID
We’re better off not on it. We’re below Congo and Bhutan.
KENNY
We’re above Iraq.
DAVID
By one place. You got a way to spin that too?
As Kenny goes back to his desk –
KENNY
I told you, kid. We got it covered. Geez. Switch to boxers.
DAVID
You’ve got a 40 cm letter criticizing the government running with a 20 cm report on our Press Freedom Index ranking. Am I right? (silence) You don’t think somebody out there is going to go (puts finger to lip) “Hmm, I wonder whether this is a set-up?”.
KENNY
(already reading his newspaper) No. I don’t think anyone will actually take the time to be that gay. Besides, we got a full-page pet the dog on Tuesday too. (P.R. voice) “The RSF index is based largely on a different media model which favors the advocacy and adversarial role of the press. Singapore's media model is different. Our model is that of a free and responsible press whose role is to report news accurately and objectively to Singaporeans.” (normal voice) Throw in the A.T. Kearney Globalization Index number, get the Jones Lang LaSalle Survey in a sidebar, and it’ll aaaaall be good.
DAVID
(under his breath, but clearly meant for Kenny to hear) Yeah, you got it “aaaaall” lubed up, haven’t you?
KENNY
(with a tinge of warning) You see any riots in the past few years? Rebels storming our offices?
DAVID
No, but –
KENNY
Singapore Inc. still spiking the charts?
DAVID
That’s not –
KENNY
So what’s your problem, kid?
DAVID
I just don’t think rebuttals slash pet the dogs are gonna cut anymore. (beat) We’ve had a really bad P.R. year – Tisch declined us –
KENNY
Never reported.
DAVID
The Warwick campus voted against us –
KENNY
(bored) It’s the British. Nobody cares.
DAVID
The Nguyen hanging pissed off the human rights group, the anti-death penalty camp, and the Australians –
KENNY
Mr. Nguyen knew of our nation’s zero tolerance of heroin –
DAVID
A*Star debacle, bloggers jailed, walkover Presidential election –
KENNY
Defamation, sedition, disqualification. All perfectly legal –
DAVID
Exactly. All legal. Michael Fay was legal, and how much ass did we have to kiss after that bit of law?
KENNY
(annoyed, putting down his newspaper) Kid. You gotta plan, spill it.
DAVID
A Speakers’ Corner.
KENNY
The London one? Here?
DAVID
It’s not rewriting the Constitution. (beat) It’s good P.R. –
KENNY
(nodding) No. No, you’re right – Free Speech and everything –
DAVID
We just need to find a place –
KENNY
I know exactly where –
DAVID
(forestalling) Somewhere central –
KENNY
(with relish) Hong Kee Park.
Dead silence.
DAVID
That’s so far west it’s practically in Malaysia. No-one’s –
KENNY
(P.R. voice) It’ll weed out the determinedly nationalistic from the merely above apathetic –
DAVID
(viciously) It’s a joke!
KENNY
Kid. (beat) You wanna change the system?
DAVID
Yes –
KENNY
You wanna do it more easily from inside the system?
DAVID
You’re not –
KENNY
Then you’ll have to stay employed in the system, won’t you?
DAVID
That’s not right.
KENNY
David, David, David. Do you really think you’re the first person to come in here all poofed up with your grand ideals –
DAVID
At least I have some ideals –
KENNY
You got any close Malay friends, David? (silence) Talk to Ahmed? – He’s the elevator guy. (silence) Lisa, the lesbian coffee girl –
DAVID
I get it –
KENNY
No. You don’t. (gently) You’re new, so you getta pass, but sometimes the problem with people like you, David, is that you look at other people and you don’t see other people. You see causes, and that’s not what we do. We’re about the people –
DAVID
(bursting out) I’m gay.
KENNY
(beat) I know. (beat) I knew. (beat) It’s the hair. (beat) You want a hug?
DAVID
You talk about us being about the people. I’m the people. What have you done for me?
KENNY
I tabled the repeal of ‘Law 69’. I think that’s pretty big for you, don’t you?
DAVID
(obstinately) The difference between us, Kenny, is that if I accidentally ‘gay up’ in public, or if some scoop-hungry journo catches me at the wrong place at the wrong time –
KENNY
Don’t be dramatic. You won’t be fired –
DAVID
I won’t get nearly enough votes at the next General Elections.
KENNY
Exactly. We’re doing the best we can under the circumstances. We close an eye to the gays, lesbians, trannies, Malays, pros, pimps, rec druggies and a whole lotta other people because we know better. But the vast majority of people out there don’t, so we leave a few stupid laws in the Constitution to keep ‘em happy. Sure, it’s not a perfect system, and there’ll always be a few angry people with axes to grind, but if everyone mostly gets to do what they like –
DAVID
Stop it. Stop talking. You do these things with words – (idealistic crusade) I’m not as well-greased as you, sir, but that isn’t tolerance. It’s avert-your-eyes, sweep-under-the-carpet, deliberate blindness, and every day that a perfectly good article gets pulled because it crosses some “sensitive” O.B. marker is another day that we get a little more blind –
KENNY
You don’t get it –
DAVID
We should be educating them –
KENNY
(wearily) People don’t want to be educated, Dave. People don’t get blinder because articles get pulled. They get blinder because they want to –
DAVID
(passionately) Then we should be making it impossible for them to ignore –
KENNY
Then how are you any different from the people you despise?
Dead silence.
DAVID
(an effort at calmness) I just think that we should be moving forwards to some sort of balance, as opposed to ignoring –
KENNY
Do you know what happens to people with agendas, David? They get ignored. It doesn’t matter how reasonable or logical you are, because as long as you’ve got an axe to grind –
DAVID
Then you should speak for us –
KENNY
(angrily) What the fuck do you think I have been doing? You talk about change like it’s a piece of magic that happens once the ink is dry. (wearily) Do you know what will happen if I do what you say? By tomorrow afternoon everyone on this floor will be canned and by tomorrow evening everything I’ve worked for in the past twelve years will be gone, just like that. Change doesn’t work the way you dream it does. It’s not fiery revolution. It’s an invisible, uncredited, slog. It’s one word here, a few more seconds of a T.V. show there, and maybe one person every few months – if we’re lucky – who starts asking a few more questions. (beat) And yes, sometimes it’s about making a proposal or floating a law that you hate, either because it’ll getcha a favor down the road, or because it’s so disgusting that you hope a few people out there will go, “What the fuck is this?”. That’s how change works.
Kenny stops. A beat, then –
DAVID
(gently) Yeah, but you fuck around with the wrong people too many times and you never get clean… Kenny.
KENNY
(beat) You ‘straightened’ yourself up to get the votes, didn’t you? (beat) It’s a revolving door here cause people don’t like getting really down and dirty, David, and they don’t like backstage work. (A pause, then wearily) It’s the only way to get things done. The only way. (beat) Right now, Singapore is a place that will break your heart if you care. And if you get tired, or if you can’t cut it, then you shouldn’t be here.
David and Kenny are silent for a long moment. Then –
DAVID
Hong Kee Park. (beat) But I want that favor down the road.
KENNY
(beat, then acknowledging) Draw up a proposal, and we’ll talk.
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