courage

A sensuous undertaking
by temi (brodkey) rose  

ACT Three ~ In the Kitchen Cont’d

Scene One: Evening

Brenda and Bruce are slow dancing to Frank Sinatra, the box step with turns, twirls, dips and variations.

Brenda: According to what criteria?
Bruce: The words you use. They reveal something about you don’t they?
Brenda: Are you asking me to define conversation? Because that’s a big subject.
Bruce: No, I just want to know if you think people reveal anything about themselves by the words we use.
Brenda: Doesn’t that depend on whether the speaker is telling the truth?
Bruce: No. Not necessarily. Someone might be thinking that they’re lying while their truth is still shining through.
Brenda: That’s very poetic, my love. What is the benefit of all this analysis?
Bruce: What is the benefit of breathing? What is the value of human nature?
Bruce & Brenda: Priceless.
Brenda: A good experience is the best medicine for a bad one.
Bruce: It takes more courage to be wise than right.
Brenda: More courage to be joyful.
Bruce (stops dancing): The most courage to be healthy because you have to fight the world that seeks to make money off weakness and isn’t satisfied until it gives a name to your deficiencies that transforms them into a disease. Once they name your disease, they have you, caught, begging them for a cure, a solution for humanness. Humanness! I don’t want to be cured of my humanness.
Brenda (kissing him): In this cold and ugly world, it takes the most courage to be elegant, to believe that life is worth dressing up for.
He laughs. They kiss properly as lights fade.

Scene Two: Midnight

Michael and Frankie kissing. Michael breaks away. Frankie stays calm. They regard one another.

Michael: I can’t.
Frankie: Because of your father?
Michael:  No. Because of me.
Frankie: ?
Michael:  I love you. You don’t love me.
Frankie: I love you.
Michael (laughs warmly): I know. I know. But it’s not the same.
Frankie: I know. Sorry.
Michael: No har-
Frankie and Michael: harm. No foul.
Frankie leans over to kiss Michael lightly just as Raj enters.
Michael: I didn’t know you were spending the night here, Raj.
Raj: Your mother couldn’t sleep last night.
Michael: She slept in the hall.
Raj: That’s more or less the same thing, don’t you think? She asked me to stay. She wants a full house tonight.
Michael: How many hearts?
Raj: Let’s count: You and Stephen, Connie, myself, Gina, your mother, anyone else?
Frankie exits.
Michael: Six hearts beating under one roof.
Michael hugs Raj affectionately and exits after Frankie.
Raj: Five to fill the space of one.
Silence filled with far away city sounds and muffled sounds of life from other apartments. Michael re-enters, sits, dejected. They share the not-quite silence.
Raj: Anything I can do?
Michael: No. I’m –
Raj: They have the advantage.
Michael: ?
Raj: People with an agenda. They have the advantage.
Michael: I guess so. But they never stop to take advantage of their advantage.
Raj laughs.
Raj: You don’t need my help. (sings somehow not absurdly) You’ve got to have heart. All you really need is heart.
Michael: It’s not about having the courage to live in the face of death. It’s about having the courage to live period. To live in the face of life, that’s fucking daunting.

Scene Three: Wee hours

Early morning 3 am. Gina is playing cards, solitaire at the kitchen table. Subtle music playing in the background. There is no overhead light, the lights are focused in specific kitchen work areas. She’s thinking out loud as she plays.

Gina: Pandas are cool. Pandas are black and white. And lovely to look at. A pudgy yin yang. I wonder if they’d be fun to hug. What their fur feels like.
Can someone drown in sorrow?
Did I drown in my tears?
They say you can never be happy in this world so you best grit your teeth, fight and win something. Because that’s as good as it gets, as good as you’ll ever get. It took me a lot of years to completely disbelieve them.
So tell me again, what’s your problem with magic?
There’s a space/time where I’m crying, a space/time where I fall to my knees, allow you to behead me. My blood on the floor. Drowning.
The shock of changed circumstances.
Who are you? Whoever you want me to be. Why not? Why can’t I be an empty vessel, a ghost in the machine, taking on all your projections and playing them out for you? The holy ghost. I don’t think so. I’m a unique snowflake.
We have to stop meeting like this.
The liquids in the kitchen pour from roundness. Circles are everywhere in the kitchen (she smiles).
Right now I do not wish to share anything. Can it be that I have come to relish being in my own good graces?  
Flesh and love. Passion and dignity.
Forget the prophets, the mystics, the hysterical apostrophes! Whoever takes love seriously has to have courage to face its contradictions, to fend off rapists of mind and body and soul, to accept the grace of love when it’s offered in whatever guise, from whatever source. Where have all the goddesses gone? Gone to movie stars every one?
Organs of perception. Organs of deception. Attempting self mastery is rebellion against someone else having mastery over you. Achieving self mastery is freedom.
I like a simple life, but every now and then I prefer a commotion. If you had six days to create a world, where would you begin? Would you start with chemistry or physics or metaphysics or astronomy, philosophy?
I would start with story. I would transform story, the peculiar relationship between past, present and future. In an instant the swirl transforms one to another. Our fixed purposes still*. The sensorial spin relaxes. Slows the beat of your heart next to mine. There is a well of truth in me, inarticulate and bold. Revelations are turning points, we all need revelation.
Brave people are just scared people with courage. You can develop courage, strength of heart and mind. They’re muscles. Sometimes you need the stubborn kind. The “I won’t budge” kind. And sometimes you need the “I don’t know what’s outside that door but I’m walking through” kind.
After you created the world in six days, what would you do on the seventh, to celebrate, appreciate what you’d created?
Flesh and love, dignity and passion.
*still as in motionless.

Scene Four: Just before Dawn

Enter Hope.

Hope: Still up.
Gina: Always.
Hope: No. I meant me. I’m still up.
Gina: Can I get you something?
Hope: No, that’s ok. I’m not sure what I want yet. I’ll root around if that’s ok?
Gina: It’s your kitchen.
Hope (as she searches): You run it.
Gina: You rule it.
Hope: No, you rule it.
Gina: We CO-operate.
Hope: We CO-laborate.
Gina: That sounds disgusting.
They laugh too loud then hush themselves so as not to wake the household. Then they go about their respective games: solitaire and the search for sustenance. Eventually, Hope finds something she likes and sets about preparing it, sitting at the table with Gina. This is not a ballet, they speak the whole while and the movement is entirely natural.
Gina: I haven’t had a midnight --
Hope (checking the clock on the stove): 3:30.
Gina: An early morning visit from you in awhile, what’s up?
Hope (her mouth full): Suicidal.
Gina: Oh. I’m glad to see you haven’t lost your appetite.
Hope: This is a different kind of suicidal.
Gina: What kind is that?
Hope: The kind where you kill your life before it kills you.
Gina: I see.
Hope: It’s more complicated than the other kind. More Freudian.
Gina: Or Jungian.
Hope: Or both.
Gina: Quite possibly.
Hope: I’m sure you’re right. I can never remember the difference.
Gina: Freud is ego, superego, id. Jung is the mandala wholeness guy.
Hope: Oh yeah, Jung is the supraconscious and Freud is the unconscious. Stalactite. Stalagmite.
Hope disappears, returns with a bottle, plunks it down with a gavel like bang on the table. Gina gets glasses. Hope pours. They toast.
Hope: Skoll.
Gina: L’chaim.
They drink in one gulp. Pour another to savor, then sit.
Hope: Once upon a time, a long long time ago.
Gina: Not so long really.
Hope: The goddess is in the details.
Gina: I don’t believe in God.
Hope: I said goddess.
Gina: I don’t believe in her either.
Hope: Me either.
Gina: You’re lying.
Hope: Yup.
They drink.
Gina: There is no such thing as satisfaction.
Hope: That is so depressing.
Gina: A little bit, yeah.
Hope: Would I be more or less depressed if I understood what you just said? Should I ask you to explain it to me? Will I regret it?
Gina: Totally up to you
Hope: Go ahead. Explain what you mean.
Gina: It’s not complicated.
Hope: Good. Cuz I’m a little bit blotzed, blitzed.
Gina: Maybe you can sleep in your bed tonight instead of in the hall.
Hope: Maybe after you explain this satiation business, I will be inspired to sleep again in the bed I shared for thirty five years with my now departed husband. Hit me.
Gina: It’s not a hitting sort of idea.
Hope: Ok, what sort of idea is it? How do I prepare myself to receive it?
Gina: Like a bubble, an iridescent bubble floating by.
Hope: A really big floppy one? I love those. Go ahead. I’m ready. Float me a bubble.
Gina: The reason we can’t get no satisfaction is because there’s no such thing.
Hope: That is so tragic. Isn’t that tragic?
Gina: No. it’s nature.
Hope: Don’t start with me about nature. Don’t start. This isn’t a bubble. It’s a lead balloon.
Gina: Appetites are not constructed to be appeased. Appetites can only grow, they can’t be satisfied.
Hope: So the more I love, the more love I want?
Gina: You go right to the heart of the matter, don’t you? I would have started with a food or drink or sex example but, yes, yes, yes. The more you love, the more you want to love.
Hope: Frustration, feelings of being denied, incompletion goes on forever?
Gina: Infinitely. That’s the only way life knows how to happen, through wanting, through desire.
Hope: But I’m sick from desire. Worn out.
Gina: Believe me, I know. Religious types suggest we give up desire to be at peace.
Hope: But how can you live separate from your desires? From your appetites, your body? That’s worse than how I already feel. Are you trying to make this worse? It’s so bloodless, so sexless. Is that why they have to drive the women away from sacred places? Because we can’t give up our body’s reality? Men are so clearly capable of the mind-body-split hypocrisy.
Gina: I was in this therapy group and eating disorders came up and we talked about the difference between getting well as an alcoholic who can and is encouraged to give up the offending object, alcohol, completely and forever, because food (and love) can’t be given up and the desire to do so is another pathology. It got me thinking about how many male-created healing groups emphasize abstention. Abstemiousness. Anhedonic abstemiousness.
Being a bit drunk, they enjoy saying the word abstemiousness.
Hope: Abstemiousness is usually assumed to be a female trait.
Gina: Assumed, yes but does that assumption bear up to scrutiny? No.
Hope: I don’t know. I don’t think traits like that are gender related at all.
Gina: I agree with you completely. My point is that the zeitgeist, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, become the truth in our imaginations unless we continuously revisit the real, what actually happens. And because women’s tasks tend to be survival based, their dis-eases, their feelings of being uncomfortable, not at ease, they cannot search for solutions that completely remove them from the source of their material entanglements. We must engage with our entanglements. Desire is the main creator of entanglement and unlike the men, we dare not, cannot, will not remove ourselves from the source of life itself.
Hope: A woman’s life is fractured. There isn’t a story, because you need a hero for a story and a hero has to have an ego and women with egos are always the villains in fiction… so, there is really no history of a woman’s life possible to write. No way to articulate the intricate, delicate dance of meaning making a heterosexual woman performs in her daily life negotiating reality, creating life.
Gina: The story of her life.
Hope: My life is dead.
Gina: No. Just wounded.
Hope: I think I’m going mad. Maybe I’m going crazy
Gina: You’re just lonely.
Hope: Maybe that’s the same thing.
Gina: No, I don’t think so.
Hope: I can’t talk to anyone.
Gina: I can’t talk to anyone either.
Hope (suddenly cruel): You don’t like anyone: there’s no one you want to talk to.
Gina (unphased): You had someone, you lost them. Was the pleasure worth the pain?
Hope: When there’s pleasure, you feel so strong, like you’ll be able to handle whatever comes. But then you crack open and none of your pieces fit. You don’t know who you are or why you are. How do I confide in anyone when I only have parts of the truth?
Gina: That’s all anyone has.
Hope: The freaky thing about truth is that it stretches to infinity but then it narrows to a wire. I miss the truth we lived and I will never live that again because it could only happen with those two specific people in that particular time.  (an old fashioned aside) Don’t let me go. I don’t know how to live without you. (back to the kitchen reality) It is inconceivable that we exist for no purpose.
Gina: Equally inconceivable that we exist for any purpose at all.
Hope: Yet people conceive these things.
Gina: And fight and die for them.
Hope: People die for a lot of bizarre reasons.
Gina: From the futility of creating mutually joyful realities?
Hope: Maybe. Where do you think dreams come from?
Gina: And why do all creatures need to sleep?
Hope: Exactly.
Hope exits to sleep in her bedroom. Gina finishes her game.
Gina: Magic is oddly obedient to respect.

Scene Five: Clean the Kitchen (part two)

Ballet #3  All actor/esses (except Arthur) enter and tidy the kitchen. Then they take everything away with them, leaving the stage empty. This time Gina is part of the group, there is no leader per se. We hear a soft jazzy rockabye baby on the tree tops, when the wind blows the cradle will rock, when the bow breaks, the cradle will fall and down will come baby, cradle and all is heard. There is no blackout. The emptiness of the stage is the

End of Act Three

Script

john leo, temi rose (elena sapora hidden), sophie nimmannit