Guerrilla Theater Company opened the doors at the Professor Street Theater thirty years ago today, on Friday, October 23, 1992. Our production was called You Have the Right to Remain Silent! which was fashioned as a game show, with the audience playing games to select from a list of titles which of twenty-one short plays we would perform next.
If that sounds like the Neo-Futurists, you're not wrong. Anyone performing short plays in a random order could be accused of the same, but the plays were original, and so were we.
That night we actually recorded the show on cassette tape. The performance sounds a bit rough, but it was opening night and I am still amazed we got through it. We were so young, and callow.
The show started with two plays, back-to-back, about toxic masculinity. Like, they both feature men shouting horrible things at women. Makes me wonder if some members of the audience were concerned about what they’d gotten themselves into.
Then there’s Hamlet by Jack Kerouac, which some might have heard before, even if they’d never been to Guerrilla, as I cannibalized the entire piece for These Are the Times. It’s one of two pieces I had written which were in the half of the performance that was recorded. It’s just the kind of cerebral drollery you might expect from a theatrical hipster.
The less said about the other piece I had written, the better. Let’s just say the propensity for young Cleveland actors to complain about their being shut out of local professional theater companies is nothing recent.
The theme for this month’s issue of The Dramatist (magazine) is “About the Craft.” Not casting spells, mind you. This is about writing plays.
There’s a Q&A with Adam Rapp. Here’s one:
Q:Do you have a routine? A regular time when you write?
A: With plays, I don’t have a set routine. I feel like I’m stowing away from the rest of my life when I’m writing a play, so a lot of it is stolen time, early in the morning or late when my mind isn’t focused on other things. A lot of long sessions. Sometimes an entire day just dissolves away. It’s pretty reckless, but I love the feeling like the play is holding me hostage.
And I thought, an entire day? Must be nice. I do not like feeling churlish, but it took long enough to realize how much I desire to just write plays all day long, and at the same time had to accept that that is simply a thing that will never happen for me.
I write in the morning. I wake up at five o’clock so I can write a half hour. Sometimes it’s a play, often it’s like a journal, and I hate that because that’s not what I got up early to do, write about me, but I have to write something and so solipsism it is.
I’ve tried writing prompts, but many of the books my wife has lodged on her bookcase are about emotional free-writing and just lead to more journaling. SO in desperation, last week I just Googled “writing prompts” and found the most most basic, clickbaity site, 365 Creative Writing Prompts which is like, write about food! Write about animals!
Why not. If it’s good enough for David Byrne.
So I have been faithfully following its lead, free-writing on the subject, but also writing a very short script inspired the subject. Every morning.
Last year, I was interviewed by Tyler Whidden for his Don’t Talk To Strangers podcast, for which he expressed interest in Guerrilla Theater Company and the entire concept of one-page* plays. In their manifesto of 1915, Italian Futurists state, “It’s stupid to write one hundred pages where one would do,” that it is unnecessary to play out an entire story of character and plot if your aim is simply to make a point.
Writing for You Have the Right to Remain Silent, I not only had to be constantly creating scripts to feed the beast, but I became attuned to thinking about writing, all day. To coming up with ideas.
While I haven’t returned to that state, just putting down my thoughts as dialogue every morning has been a refreshing break and mentally satisfying. And I have begun to post these at New Play Exchange.*
Read the first of these short plays, Welcome or Friends at New Play Exchange. *The plays I have been writing are one written page. In script form they take a few pages. Don't give me a hard time.
I went up to the office during a break to check the election returns on CNN, where I was stunned to see the projected returns quite solidly suggested that Bill Clinton was going to win.
The idea that twelve years of Republican presidency, and specifically the Reagan-Bush Era, was coming to a close, was beyond my ken.
In 1980 I was twelve. Then I was twenty-four.
I came downstairs and announced the news, which led to a general cheer from the entire company.
Retro, our more libertarian member, sneered, “Man. What the hell are you people gonna write about now?”
The space was the Professor Street Theater. We’d signed the lease in August, $700 a month for two thousand feet of performance space downstairs and four rooms upstairs.
Four could squat for $175 each and we’d never need to generate a penny’s worth of profit for our work. We presented Silent! for eight months, closing in May to take a short break, produced a Shakespeare and then vacated for a different Tremont location.
Retro held onto the lease for a while, creating and presenting the Off-Hollywood Flick Fest there before the owner sold the place and it was a private residence and artists’ studio for nearly twenty-five years before the coffee shop Beviamo relocated there last year.
Professor Street Theater (above) and Beviamo Cafe (below)
Last April, I stepped into the space at 2275 Professor for the first time for the first time in almost a quarter century for a latte, and to get majorly freaked out.
It’s the same room, only so much brighter and different. Our early 90s landlord was adamant about our not changing a thing about the building, he pitched a fit when we painted a sign on the front door without his permission. It was easier to ask forgiveness.
The walls had been paneled all the way to the ceiling, the present occupants stripped away top level revealing fashionable brick, and painted the lower part white, brightening to room. We had papered over the windows for show privacy and to render the room entirely dark if necessary. Now the room is full of natural light.
Then & now.
While there are a few major alterations (the bathroom has been rerouted) what was startling was how the same the room felt. It was disorienting, sitting on a new platform in the window, sipping coffee and looking over the space like a hovering ghost.
Thoughts of a revival were inevitable. What if we staged a fundraiser, reading old scripts, or even writing new ones, right here where it all happened? No, really, maybe we shouldn’t. And besides, no one knows where the scripts are anymore. I don’t have them.
So what did we have to write about, now that "our guy" was going to the White House? We had only for two been weeks criticizing the George H. W Bush administration, would we now be praising and supporting this new president? Waving the flag for the status quo?
We did begin that way, we had to. He repealed the gag rule, that abortion could not be discussed in the military. And we would champion his attempts at health care reform and allowing gays to serve openly in the military … two agendas which failed, and failed badly in short order.
Much of our work turned inward, and by that I mean not only introspective (and also, unfortunately, at each other) but more local.
In the final days of 1992, an African-American man died while in police custody. He had been placed in a choke hold which rendered him unconscious, and was later determined to have been the cause of death. Then, as now, excessive force is an issue which plagues the Cleveland police department. Torque wrote a piece about that.
The choke hold play (title?)
There were audience members who openly objected to the political stuff, especially when it wasn’t funny. We took a stand against being portrayed as a sketch comedy group (or God forbid, improv) and intentionally threw in conceptual pieces for their own sake, with no punchline whatsoever.
The Scene Magazine reviewer, turgidly recounting every minute sexual reference from the performance he witnessed (even creating a few where they didn't existed) claimed the choke hold scene "backfired like a '62 Buick."
He also described Beemer as a "solid gold b----," so I guess that's funny?
After election day we retired a piece written by Jelly Jam, one I was proud to have had a hand in, creating a recorded soundscape of musical and nature sounds, and a weird voice-over (Lee's voice slowed down.)
With the lights dimmed, the entire company of seven crawled the floor, rose to their feet, came together but then fell away as the voice described and ancient ritual which made a people strong, but as more and more failed to participate, the civilization collapsed.
The ritual was called “voting.”
Yes, we were young and determined and optimistic and basic. We were also right.
Vote on November 6th.
Source: "Comedy for the Young at Heart" by Keith Joseph, Cleveland Scene, 2/18/1993 Thanks to Kim Martin for the 2018 photos!
Guerrilla Theater Company opened You Have The Right To Remain Silent on October 23, 1992, with performances every single Friday and Saturday night beginning at 11:00 PM until closing for a summer hiatus the following May.
We had received good advice from friends operating a different late night theater production in Chicago. They said for the first two years, they most performed to a small number of dedicated family and friends.
It was our mission to write new work for every weekend (seven new out of twenty-one short plays, every week) and to never cancel a performance. We canceled one, during a blizzard. No one showed up for that one regardless, and I am glad to say it was the only performance where no one did.
My partner Torque had a dream, which was that when something important happened, in Cleveland, or in the world, people would want to know what the Guerrillas had to say about it. That our satiric take on events would be important.
After all, pre-internet, up-to-the-moment political satire was relegated to the television, and the television didn’t traffic in political satire. Johnny Carson and Arsenio Hall were your only nighttime talk show hosts, and they kept it light.
There were no network hosts willing to take strong political positions like Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel or Seth Meyers, no Daily Show, Full Frontal or Last Week Tonight. The only program that might comment on current events would be Saturday Night Live.
Three weeks before we opened, on October 3,1992 the network allowed host Tim Robbins to shame General Electric in his opening monologue -- but then were caught flat-footed when musical guest Sinéad O’Connor surprised everyone by tearing up a photograph of John Paull II. It was rare moment of protest on a program that had famously avoided that kind of controversy.
The fact is, we didn’t really watch the show anymore. Core company members Rob Schneider, Chris Farley and Julia Sweeney were not exactly daring in their performances, Kevin Nealon one of the most toothless Weekend Update hosts, and Dana Carvey departed shortly after George H. W. Bush left office.
There have only been a couple times in recent memory when tuning in to (or most recently, checking the YouTube page for) Saturday Night Live was something absolutely everyone wanted to do, to see what their their take was going on.
The first was eight years ago, when Tina Fey’s iconic impersonation of Sarah Palin so defined Palin’s character that ever since it has seemed like Palin has only been impersonating Tina Fey.
Most recently, it has been the Clinton/Trump debates. Kate McKinnon has impersonated Hillary Clinton during the entire 2016 campaign season, but it was Alec Baldwin’s scabrous take on Donald J. Trump that caused a sensation.
There are those who have criticized these debate sketches for “normalizing” the person of Donald J. Trump, which is ridiculous. You don’t blame the fool. Only the Republican Party can be blamed for nominating and promoting an outspoken, xenophobic misogynist who never condemned the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan and embraced the support of the Russian government for normalizing Donald J. Trump.
And their gamble won. By standing idly by while American integrity was compromised and American dignity was decimated, the Republican Party has near absolute power of the government. Lines that few had dared cross before certainly have been, and we can only imagine what happens next.
But Hillary Clinton is (fill in the blank.) Okay, whatever. She lost* and between she and President Obama reminded the American people what it means to step away with dignity, with whatever dignity it is we as a nation have left.
I was sure that few who have enjoyed watching SNL during the past few weeks were looking forward to last night’s program. I mean, do we ever want to see Baldwin’s Trump ever again? What could possibly be funny on November 12, 2016?
Well. As my father always reminded me, when you aim at a king you must kill him. And the folks at SNL created a cold open to conclude this traumatic election season with class, style, pathos, breathtaking timeliness and most of all talent.
Who knew Kate McKinnon could sing and play the piano like that?
Leonard Cohen died the day before election day, on November 7 and for better or for worse, his Hallelujah is his best known and most covered song. But is because of our familiarity with that song, as performed by McKinnon’s Hillary Clinton, that makes this tired paean once again mournfully triumphant.
*The Electoral College. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a sizable margin.
April fools’ day. Back in the day, urban legends were all the rage. The TV program The X-Files wove them through their storylines, and that was great fun. The 90s was cottage industry for the telling and retelling of classic tales of fiancees sold into white slavery, bugs found in food products, and celebrities helping (or snubbing) helpless motorists.
The vast majority of these tales are patently false. As Thomas Edison once said, “if something sounds unbelievable, it probably is.” Actually, Edison didn’t say that, but saying that he did makes the quote sound better. When we told these stories at camp, or hiking in the dump behind the train tracks, or spelunking under the elementary school, they added a sense of rich history of weirdness to our care-free, suburban lives.
Around the time the internet went mainstream, Barbara and David Mikkelson started their urban legends database, snopes.com. I found it in 1996 and for reasons I cannot remember, but they involved searching for horrible events which have occured in Disney theme parks. What made Snopes.com unique, and endearing it to me, was not that it perpetuated urban legends, but that they researched them and stove to determine their veracity.
For the 1997-98 season of Dobama's Night Kitchen (my third) we decided to revisit the long-form improvisation scenario developed our first season. Our first attempt was The Realistic World, which was more like an onstage soap opera than "reality TV". The company developed stock Gen-X characters who bounced off of each other in a common setting, with the result more often insult humor than say romance or drama, and no real plot to speak of.
Unexplained Phenomenon
This new endeavor, One Step Beyond, would be inspired by (ta-da) urban legends, part X-Files, part Twilight Zone. Each hour long scenario was based on (and around) one urban legend or bizarre historical news event -- the molepeople, suicide cults -- with a few recurring characters which gave anyone paying attention (was anyone paying attention?) the idea that everything was interconnected like some Illuminati/Gray Alien conspiracy. There was more plot, but also more opportunities for humor, than in The Realistic World. We scoured the internet for source material, much of it from snopes.
I have been visiting snopes.com for so many years now, that I trust it, and like many, use it to put the lie to certain vicious internet rumors which circulate from time to time. Because with the internet, urban legends have gone from tales of collective spoken myth, into outright lies told simply through infographics posted on Facebook. In this way, “a lie gets halfway round the world before the truth can check its inbox,” as Mary Todd Lincoln once told William Seward. At a party. A friend of my brother heard her say it.
The other day I saw (again) a graphic explaining how wearing pants that sag halfway down your ass so that your boxers show is an old prison trick, to show how available and interested you are to engage in sodomy in exchange for safety. There’s another term for this, but you know what that is.
This “urban legend” has rubbed me the wrong way for some time. People from certain walks of life hate the sagging pants thing. They aren’t racist or anything, but why can’t those boys pull up their pants, it’s ridiculous. The fact that a cultural thing that so irritates certain people would have what is obviously supposed to be a humiliating origin story seemed far too convenient.
Checking snopes I found that this fashion does in fact originate from prison life. Prison togs are often the wrong size, so ex-cons began wearing pants that were too big, and that need to be hiked up every couple of steps. And so became a fashion trend. End of story.
But why perpetuate the man-on-man sex myth?
Or more to the point, what are you saying when you “SHARE” this particular item on Facebook? That if you wear pants that sag, what you are really saying is that you are gay?
That if you wear pants that sag, you are really saying is that you want a man to fuck you up the ass?
Is that what you are saying? Is it? That you're gay? You're gay right now? Are you?
In the case of this particular legend, the "f-word" lurks next to the “n-word” in the expression of disgust or contempt generated by the person who shares/tells it. Because you can’t attempt to shame someone out of a certain behavior without making judgement about that behavior.
In a week that my Facebook page has been covered from top to bottom with messages of support for Marriage Equality, and pictures of happy, gay couples, receiving this other kind of message, one which expresses open contempt for and fear of sexual activity between men (mocking, inarguably, one certain race of men - infographic of a Caucasian notwithstanding) was jarring and disappointing.
"Gone Bad"
Near the end of our first, tumultuous year producing and performing You Have The Right To Remain Silent, one of the new guys wrote a piece which I assumed was true, because he had heard it somewhere, and we performed it. It was a very funny piece, where I played a down-and-out member of the Little Rascals trying to mug a young couple, but the crime falls apart because they recognize me and feel sorry for me. Seems Bill Cosby had bought the rights to all the old Little Rascals shorts and wouldn't let anyone see them anymore because of its negative depiction of African-Americans.
It's a trope that comes around every now and again, how some member of some minority group who has attained a certain amount of wealth or power has made things sad for everyone else due to some politically correct action on their part.
These stories are rarely true, subtly or in some cases obviously racist or sexist, though what they convey is not obvious. But they are based in fear, or hate, or certainly disrespect. I have always hated the fact that I participated in that sketch and helped perpetuate this kind of lie.
The comedian and I first met in early 1992. A mutual friend knew him from Los Angeles, when he was trying to make a go of things and living out of his car. After two very successful appearances on Johnny Carson, he was fast becoming one of the most famous people from Cleveland, even more than Trent Reznor or Tom Hanks or other famous Clevelanders who aren’t actually from here. His sold-out appearances at The Improv at the Powerhouse were like the return of a conquering hero. We weren't there merely to laugh, but to celebrate his success along with him.
The comedian came to see You Have The Right to Remain Silent in January, 1993. His appearance went largely unrecognized by the rest of the audience, his debut as a supporting character on a short-lived ABC sit-com was only then in the works, and his eponymous hit show still a few years off. He looked like everyone else in his jeans and Indians jacket, only the trademark glasses and buzz cut set him apart.
Following the performance, while the Guerrillas mingled among the audience, he pulled me down into a chair to show me his program. There were pencil marks all over it.
"I hope you don't mind," he said, "I took the liberty of grading the show."
"Hey," I said. "Cool." "You'll have to help me out here," he said, "these are all out of order 'cause of the show, and I can't remember which are which -- this one here, this is the one with the guitar?"
"Yes."
"Very funny, folk singer humor, very good. Now which was the one with the two guys with the guns, the John Woo thing --"
"Torque wrote that one."
"Brilliant, I was howling. I got it, too, it’s like an arms treaty thing, right?"
“Right.”
He continued. "Now this one, the one with the guy with the telephone, who gets mugged, right?"
"Yeah. That's one of mine."
"Pretty gross," he said, "not my thing, not too funny."
"Yeah, but, it wasn't supposed to be funny," I said.
He looked at me like I was an ungracious little turd.
"I know that," he said. "I'm telling you what's funny."
10:30 PM on Friday October 23, 1992. The Guerrillas were all prepared, we were all in the “auditorium” -- except Jelly Jam, who was off by himself somewhere in the house.
The Wheel was up and ready, with a laminated picture of each of our faces on it and one of the Guerrilla Gorilla. The Guerrilla Gorilla himself was seated in a chair on-stage, wearing a helmet and a GTC T-shirt.
A prize from Big Fun was hung behind Door #2, a free-standing door with a big, rainbow-colored, happy number two painted on it. All the props were laid out with care on a long, narrow table, made out of one by eight and some cinder blocks.
We had fifty folding chairs, on loan for the weekend from Our Lady of Mercy, in four rows -- a big block of seats in the center, and two smaller sections to the right and left, which were angled slightly to better face the stage. The stage was a runway about five feet deep and thirty feet long -- one side of the room. The bathroom was clean. The coffee was brewing. There was a platter of fruit, cheese and crackers sitting on a stool in the center of the playing space, a few feet from the first row. That was for our audience.
Geddy was our Technical Support and Sound Guy. He was in the booth, an actual little sound booth that had been built and then left behind by a previous tenant, situated at the far end of the stage, and he started the pre-show tape. We opened the door.
And a couple of friends were waiting to come in.
Upon entering, people were directed to the ticket booth, where they would be asked if they had prepared for The Theme of the Weekend. Those who were got in for five dollars, those who hadn’t, for seven.
Theme for the First Weekend was “Theatre.” Most of us simply wore T-shirts advertising other theaters (I was wearing my Karamu House shirt) and those few audience members who really understood what the whole “theme” concept was about either did the same or some of them brought scripts or ticket stubs, programs from other theaters, which were fine. Our family members and close friends sported the new Guerrilla Shirts we had extorted them to buy.
Some tried to use the word “theatre” as a password, they were not given the discount. I was appalled at all of the people who made a fuss about having to pay two extra, stinking dollars at the door. Our explanation that seven dollars was the admission, and preparing for the Theme was a discount did little to mollify their tiny, withered souls.
Wee-Bear’s husband was one of them. He was dismayed he had to pay at all. On the way past the box office he noticed a sign we had made and stuck to a wall in an obscure place, a sign we hoped we might need to put out on the door sometime soon.
It read “SOLD OUT. Please come back next week!”
“Heh,” he said, spying the sign and pointing it out to Beemer, “wishful thinking, eh?”
Around 11:15 PM we had roughly thirty people in the house, mostly friends and family. When we decided we couldn’t hold the house any longer, the Guerrillas moved through the space, turning the four bare bulbs in the ceiling off one by one. The stage lights (four flood lights, directed at the stage area, their bases screwed to the tin ceiling) were dimmed for effect.
Geddy hit the Theme Music, and we all burst onto the stage from left and right.
“Good evening!” I said, “and welcome to You Have the Right to Remain Silent! Cleveland’s own live action game show! Fraught with radical political thinking, dangerous social expression, and FABULOUS PRIZES!”
Cheers and applause.
“Thank you all for hanging on there, we wanted to wait until we had an audience. NOW --”
Chuckles.
“-- I’d like to explain the rules of the game. If you will open up your program, in the center, you will find something called a Hit List --”
I was talking very, very fast.
“What we’ll be doing for you this evening are a bunch of plays, ranging from five seconds to two minutes, that we call HITS. We’ll be doing them in a Hit and Run format, you’ll know a piece has begun because we will yell the title of the Hit, and then the word, HIT, we’ll perform the HIT, then yell the word RUN and we’ll go onto the next one.”
Oh boy, did this need to be rehearsed.
“We’ll choose the order, we, all of us, uh, of the Hits, by playing games. We’ll be playing games with you, the audience, and we’ll be picking certain members of you to decide what we will be seeing next. All right?”
No response.
“Now we only have 27 Hits, you’ll see that there are 24 titles listed there, and that’s because three of them are what we call ‘Misses’.”
“Twenty-one,” Beemer mumbled.
“Twenty-seven Hits?” Torque asked.
“Did I say twenty-seven?” I asked. “No, we have twenty-one Hits, there are twenty-three names in the program, three of them are Misses --”
Okay, by now the audience was completely confused, and the Guerrillas were laughing at me.
“-- which are titles without any plays attached to them. If you stand up and pick a MISS, Geddy will play the theme song, and we’ll bring you up here to spin --”
Jelly Jam spun the Wheel. Click, click, click, click, click!
“-- our own Wheel of Misfortune.”
Big laugh.
“Which this weekend is sponsored by Heart of the South Side,” and I pointed out the large, round ad for that establishment that was taped to the center of the Wheel.
“Now. If it lands on, say, Torque, you get to do a piece with him. We’ll give you a script and you’ll get to perform with him, for everyone. If it lands on the Gorilla, you get the shirt off the Gorilla’s back --” gesturing at the Guerrilla Gorilla “-- OR what’s behind DOOR #2!” And Jelly Jam pulled a Vanna next to The Door.
Very big laugh. And thank God for it.
“The prize behind Door #2 is brought to you by Big Fun on Coventry. But you will have to sacrifice the T-shirt to find out what it is. You don’t get to find out what is behind Door #2 without trading the shirt for it.”
Wow, that took a long time.
“Have I left anything out?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Torque said, wild-eyed.
“There will be three rounds, the first will be The Quotation Round, you all filled out cards when you came in, sharing your thoughts and your name, we’ll bring two Guerrillas up here, they’ll read the quotes and whichever gets the loudest audience response gets to pick the first Hit. Easy enough?”
No response.
“Let’s begin!”
The Guerrillas ran to me, standing center. I pulled two quotes blindly out of my Fanny Pack, handed one to Torque and one to Beemer.
“Torque!” I said, asking Torque to read the quote I given him.
Quotations. There would be over 700 quotes read during the first season, and maybe 2000 read during the second season. Torque read the very first quote ever read in a Guerrilla show.
“Fuck off!” he said.
And off we went.
It was all very rough, but everyone, including, thank goodness, the audience, was up for it. These were some of the other quotations that night:
“They say no man is an island, who are they, anyway?”
“The half-life of a cheeseburger in red pumps.”
“I wuv you.”
“Fuck me like fried-potatoes on the most beautiful,
hungry morning of my goddamn life.”
“While the juices of society flow gently into mediocrity.”
“Happiness.”
“It started out as a wart on my ass.”
“Left turn on red.”
“Bugs!”
But my, we flew through the Hits. The first two happened to carry strong feminist messages from Torque, which inspired some self-conscious giggling.
Then we got to Retro’s first piece, Short Term Memory, in which Torque and Retro beat the hell out of themselves trying to remember the name of Joyce DeWitt. Now that got applause.
We sent up Hamlet. We made fun of Ross Perot, and the Cleveland Play House. We slammed Deadbeat Dads and Catholicism. Retro shared creepy stories from work and Mammy revealed how sexist the names of cocktails are. And of course, "Disaster Movie Theater". By the end of the show ... well, the most important thing that night was, we reached the end of the show.
“Thanks for coming!” I called, over the applause and music, “We will continue to do this show every Friday and Saturday night at 11 PM from now until the end of time! So tell your friends, and remember --”
“You Have the Right to Remain Silent!” yelled all the Guerrillas, and we all did the Dating Game Kiss -- MMMMMWHAH!
We danced to the music and let that carry us into the audience where we shook hands, hugged our friends, and talked to as many people as we could. As the last few people filed out, and we were cleaning up, Torque came up to me and we gave each other a big hug.
“We did it,” he said, overwhelmed. “I can’t believe we’ve actually done it.”
“Yeah, we did,” I said, laughing. “I gotta tell you, I was expecting the police or the Fire Marshall to show up any minute and shut us down. I guess they don’t care.”
“Yeah. Hope that lasts,” he said. “What I can’t figure out is ... why doesn’t everybody do this?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, this was easy,” he said. “Everybody talks about doing a show, everyone talks and talks about starting their own company, their own theater, and we just did it. It doesn’t make sense.”
“This wasn’t easy,” I said, finally. “We spent all summer doing this.
“All of this,” I said, and waved my hand at our space, “we put a lot of long hours into this place. The three of us have been having meetings, being serious about it, putting the time in. Nothing easy about it.”
He said, “Hmn." Wee-Bear had tallied the box office receipts.
“Hey, everybody!” she announced to all the Guerrillas after the front door was closed and locked, “Guerrilla Theater Company made over $150 tonight!”
A hundred and fifty dollars, in admission and donations! In one night! That was truly stunning. There were cheers all around.
She went on to proclaim happily, “I think the first round at Edison’s is on Guerrilla Theater Company tonight!”
“Yee-ah!” Retro howled. “I don’t think we should spend our profit on beer,” Torque said.
“Oh come on,” she said. “It’s Opening Night! I mean ... I mean -- come on!”
“I’ve got the first round,” I said. “We’ll let the company hang onto that money until we decide what to do with it.”
And we went to Edison’s, and I got the first round. I may have gotten the sixth as well, but by then I had stopped counting.
On Monday I handed in my two-weeks notice at Karamu.
, because it is a shame Bill Cosby owns the rights and won't let anyone see them anymore.)
