(diaryland) July 1, 2000 - 17:12:23

"She is like electricity."

Hm.

I had been sitting in a small room with two other people I knew, one other person I had just met, three other strangers and a colourful lady who had a purple t-shirt on that said "Spunky" in bulbous writing on it. We were all silent. We had been watching two people lie motionless in bed for the last eight minutes. The room was in the middle of a backpackers' hostel. That's right. I was in the audience for a Deep and Meaningful Play.

I'd just gotten a packet of biscuits out of a vending machine. I was really hungry. I kept looking longingly at the unopened biscuits, but there was no way I was going to make rustling noises. I decided to tough it out and just watch the play hungry.

Finally, the dude started talking about how the chick was like electricity, but he made sure that we understood that she WASN'T like lightning. No siree. The chick didn't seem to mind that she was being talked about. It was then that I decided that we were actually hearing his thoughts. Right. Cool. Suddenly the dude stopped talking about her, and they lay in bed in silence for a while again. I looked at the biscuits.

The chick started talking. She was a mean chick. She said that the guy was a lazy slob and she slapped him. She then asked him to tell her a story. He seemed to have a story conveniently ready. He talked about how his mum got her womb cut open by her mean and nasty landlords and killed the baby inside it. We were all deeply concerned about this. The biscuits looked less yummy for a while as he described the fact that the nasty landlords had sewed her back up with the baby inside and the baby came out over the next few years in bits.

Then, they talked at great length about how they were both prostitutes. Someone knocked on the door. Everyone looked at the door. No-one moved. The prostitutes went back to their acting. Then there was more knocking. We, the audience, of course thought it was all part of the play. We sat dumbly. The chick had to go over and open the door herself. A man came in and said, "Am I late?" The chick stayed in character and looked at him with contempt. She went back to acting, and the man sat down with us, feeling a tad uncomfortable.

The chick then told a story about how she killed a paedophile in the park once when she was a kid. It was a very nice story. She then told the dude to put on her makeup. He did that and she said she was never going to come back again. I was happy. She got up and went to the door. She opened it, and she said, "Same time tomorrow?" It was unbelievably corny.

The lady with the "Spunky" t-shirt started clapping, just to let us know that the play was over. Then we all clapped. It would have been nicer if we had stared at the actors for, say, twenty minutes, and then clapped. But no. The bright lady ruined that for us.

The actors all of a sudden stared laughing and acting normal. It was scary. The angry prostitute chick wasn't an angry prostitute chick at all. She was a laughing, friendly person. I hated it. She hugged the late man; the man she had been so menacing at when he had knocked on the door.

I finally got to eat my biscuits.