The Liberty Bell

I performed a performance one night not so long ago and it was not a first time performance of this performance, but one in a series of a thousand performances…maybe hundreds. It was an abandoned rail car packed with hobos, heads on fire, everyone screaming and trying to remember their lines, the rail car goes off the tracks, down a steep embankment, careening between red-coral canyon walls, two of the iron wheels fall off, three sides of the boxcar open, the car flips, yet the hobos keep singing and screaming, now ad-libbing the dialogue…holes in the floor appear, hobo’s falling into the hole, off the sides, some being scraped along the walls; blood everywhere….this goes on for appears to be about 18 days. Finally the boxcar comes to rest in a crevasse below the ocean.

I talk to several people after and they say,
“Great job, that was funny.”

I explain to each person that “this happened and that happened, and I really wasn’t pleased about how we did this then, and the before moment came after, and the cue for the other thing didn’t go right, the 3rd act reveal broke in the 1st act and we couldn’t find glue so we used paperclips, the tech stuff killed us, the hobo fire was too bright or didn’t have enough orange in it, the two wheels came off and they were the wrong two wheels and we knew that you knew, we could see that you could see, we could feel what you were feeling, AND, the parking lot where you parked was fucked up, I stubbed my toe a couple weeks ago, fucking gas is expensive, man is hot out or what? -My haircut is wrong, this gum is too chewy, my lawyer is suing me, fucking hummingbirds are in my backyard again, the ocean is broken, the greeter at Walmart is an asshole, my coffee was tea, black is black, white is white. Did you like the thing? That really didn’t work. No it didn’t. You don’t know anything. Fuck you, it was horrible and you’ve deluded yourself to think that what you saw was good cause you paid a lot of money... -If you paid nothing you would’ve seen all the flaws that we experienced in the moment. Fuck you, you’re not my friend!”

Finally a woman stopped me and said, “You just say thank you.”

“What?....What do you mean?”

“You need to just shut up and say, thank you….after your little show.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“It’s diminishing…what you’re doing--”

“--Doing what?--”

“--No, it’s rude. …Someone is trying to be gracious and you are refusing them. You are diminishing them. You need only be kind and say, thank you.”

“Oh.”