they started thinking…

(STEP-BROTHER is a young adolescent with a rather volatile fascination with zombies)

SHIT! SHIT! Did you see that? He put that spear through the fucker’s head. Schwck! SPLAT! Leguizamo was pinned down in that abandoned shop…and the zombie was holding him down…and I thought he was fucked…zombie food, man…and Leguizamo put that spear through the fucker’s head! Schwck…SPLAT!

Yeah. It was cool. Not as cool as “Dawn Of The Dead” where the zombie bit that woman’s shoulder off. Woah! I couldn’t fucking sleep the night after I saw that. Snuck into the drive-through in the back of Chip’s pick-up – under the tarp.

That was scary. And the bikers. Bikers were as creepy as the zombies.

SHIT! But that spear through the fucker’s head! That was AWESOME!

(silences)

They started thinking. The zombies started thinking in this one. And that freaks me out. Seems the only thing that would make being a zombie okay is that you couldn’t think at all. You just eat and shit. And get your head blown off or sliced in two by some short hispanic with a spear gun.

Do they know they’re zombies? Do they know they can’t be people again?

shit.

I can’t think of anything scarier. Knowing you can’t be people again. Knowing you can’t feel good again.

(Over the next few weeks, I plan to blog in the voice of the characters from Fist In The Pocket’s upcoming production of “WASHING MACHINE”. I’ll find a theme – something that catches my fancy – and then I’ll blog about it from two perspectives. I’ll blog from the perspective of myself – which will be posted at THE EPHEMERAL

And then I’ll blog from the perspective of the characters here at fistinthepocket.wordpress.com

Tickets for “WASHING MACHINE” are available at www.theatremania.com

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“WASHING MACHINE” is coming soon!

The experiment is simple. Whether it will work or not is about to be discovered. Will I, as a writer, have the wherewithal to maintain a riveting narrative or the tenacity to sustain a captive audience over the following weeks?

But, uncertainty in the face of creating anything seems to be a benchmark of these kinds of endeavors. And since I’m not reinventing the wheel and simply dressing one up in slightly reorganized hand-me-down clothes – this should all prove to be fairly harmless if it fails.

Do, or do not. There is no try.

Fist In The Pocket, a theatre company I founded with Michael Chamberlin last year, is presenting a revival of “WASHING MACHINE”, a one-woman show I penned detailing the grisly death of a five-year-old girl who was mysteriously trapped and asphyxiated inside a Laundromat washing machine in a small, unnamed town somewhere in Middle America.

And there was many a desperate night writing this thing where I knotted every internal organ trying to keep it from being a downer!

One of my solutions was to show the small town and how it was impacted by the tragedy. And if you have ever stopped long enough in a small town to actually exchange a few sentences with any of the population, you know that it’s a veritable culture dish of strange, eccentric personalities.

Of course, small towns don’t have a monopoly on eccentric characters. As I write this, sitting in this uncomfortably cold, heavily air-conditioned coffee house in New York City, I’ve just seen two blue-haired dwarfs walk by that actually put me in mind of punk Billy Bartys.

The difference is that the small town eccentrics are often less obvious. When everyone in town knows your name and your address – I think you have to keep your kinks, perversions, and closeted skeletons much closer to home – and far more hidden.

But, believe me; they come out – often in extraordinary ways.

This was how I managed to keep this horrific story from getting bogged down in inevitable despair. I showed the light and life of this small town. I thought back to the strange, wily characters from all those youthful drives my family would make to Willow Springs, Missouri. I remembered the stories my grandparents would tell me about the town oddities. I though back to the aging waitresses at the greasy spoon just off the highway. The “old coot” (as someone affectionately called one of the characters from the show the other day) who would sell fruit out of the back of his pickup. And I wondered – who takes the time to stop and buy this stuff? And I realized that someone must stop – there’s a reason he keeps coming out here.

Over the next few weeks, I plan to blog in the voice of these characters. I’ll find a theme – something that catches my fancy – and then I’ll blog about it from two perspectives. I’ll blog from the perspective of myself – which will be posted at THE EPHEMERAL

And I’ll also blog from the perspective of one of the characters from the play here at fistinthepocket.wordpress.com

And hopefully, with a little bit of luck and a little bit of burnt midnight oil, I might just have something interesting.

And perhaps I’ll get a few of you to come out and see this bizarre, enigmatic, experimental, at times wonderfully funny little show that I’ve created with my director Michael and our wonderful actress Dana.

And so we begin….

Tickets are available at www.theatremania.com