I Don't Want Your Damned Eggs

...so stop dive bombing me. I didn't know you had your nest up there under the eaves, I just wanted to fix the runoff from the tomato plants on the deck. Ouch! OK! I'll go!



After the bird episode, Plot and Duck went to see Krapp's Last Tape. (You can read the San Francisco Theater Blog review here. Krapp was written by Samuel Beckett. Krapp peels a banana. Krapp grunts. What Plotnik will not be saying in his review is that forty minutes is both 'way too short to count as a real play and charge real money to go see, and it's also thirty minutes too long for anyone to sit in an audience and watch.

He lied. He did say it. He also asks what is it about Irish writers once they're older than thirty? How morose do we have to get? How much whiskey can we allow ourselves to drink? How little motion can we make in our lives, except to drink more whiskey and mourn our mothers? How can anyone want to see a play about a man who eats bananas and listens to old tapes of himself, recorded when he was young and already considered his life worthless, now that he's old and knows for sure?

It doesn't help Plotnik's lack of enjoyment of this modernist classic that they are mounting Krapp at a theater in the middle of the Tenderloin, where America's drunken refuse lines the streets and intersection corners smell like outhouses, where they hand out cupcakes at the end of the show and you eat them quickly inside because once you're outside you won't have any appetite, unless you enjoy the smell of uric acid.

What the hell is going on on the streets of America, anyway? And why is this Samuel Beckett play considered to be one of his masterpieces? (Maybe because, compared to "Waiting for Godot," Krapp's Last Tape is an action thriller.) Shouldn't every writer be fitted with some kind of Self-Indulgence Buzzer?

(Jeezo, that's not a very good idea, is it? What would happen to bloggers?)

OK, maybe not. But it's Memorial Day. We celebrate the hundreds of thousands of soldiers from every nation on Earth who fought and died to defend their particular version of liberty. If you want to talk about self-indulgence, who could be more self-indulgent than a political demagogue? Our nations would all have been better off if certain leaders had simply gotten good and drunk and moved into a sleeping bag on Eddy Street, rather than into the houses of power.

Obviously, the sins of the mean streets of Saint Plotniko are not the worst sins humanity can offer up. Some of those faces, now bloated with cheap wine and illness, were no doubt once soldiers and sailors and airmen and paratroopers and kids from our farms and cities who were fighting to protect us.

Maybe it's Plotnik who needs the buzzer. What he is trying to say here to all the vets in his extended family, particularly Harold Lovell and Joe Senior and Joe Junior, who all went to war on ships in the Pacific, is: thank you. We all get to live more easily in our warm little nests because of the sacrifices you made.

Plotnik says -- that is, I say: Thank you.