Autobiography as One Man Show

ALEXANDER

Hi, all.

I just wanted to give you a quick heads up that this episode is a little different, and it goes into some fairly serious subject matter, including, death of a parent, addiction, and child endangerment. If you need more detailed content warnings, you can find them in the show notes below.

[Circus version of theme music]

You are listening to Exercises in Sound, an exploration of narrative sound design.

JAMES

First of all, Felix, that was amazing.

And also Alex, you can go fuck yourself.

How dare you put us through this meta questioning of, of what is acceptable to mine for art, and then I'm gonna tell him, "hey, why don't you do something where you, kind of make fun of the dude."

I'm like, wait a minute, how do I do that? Who wants to be like, OK, now this time what I want you to do is I want--and this is a real thought--I want you to, approach this like you're doing a one-man show, but it's gonna have that quality of like... it's not a great one-man show.

And and, I'm like, how, how we're we're gonna demean this...

[Music fades. Sounds of an audience in a theatre.]

[A spotlight turns on. Audience applause.]

CHARACTER A (Felix Trench)

Oh, what? I guess I fell asleep.

Hey, you let me fall asleep!

[Awkward laughter from an audience member.]

Hello?

Where'd you go?

There you are.

[Crosses to other side of stage.]

CHARACTER B (Felix Trench)

Ahhhhhhhh, we're doing that again, are we? Themes of absence. Always comes back around to that with this writer, doesn't it?

Usually he writes about absent fathers. Fathers who disappear, fathers who die, fathers in prison.

[Honks clown horn.]

All the autobiographical variations. Most of his memories of his father are arrivals. No sustained memories of presence, just moments of appearance. His father entering through a door with a garbage bag full of fell off the back of a truck gifts or spotting his father from a distance and running to him across a field. Ah-- a prison yard.

[Honks clown horn.]

Family day at the prison. They had a craft fair. His father gave him a hug and some art. The grass was green, that's part of the memory. Once you put that detail into a script, it immediately becomes the laziest fucking metaphor you could imagine, but still. It's a real detail of his memory, green grass in the prison yard, sheets thrown down on the ground for a picnic.

[In a Tiny Tim voice] Nice to see you, daddy. Hope to see you again when you get out.

[Honks clown horn.]

[Someone in the audience laughs. Someone else shushes them.]

That doesn't really work here, does it? There's no father role in this script.

You're an adult. You're fine.

But maybe the writer wants to do a version where character A is a child. Maybe he already has, that'd fit. That'd be right on point. Even so, it's more themed around a fear of abandonment, not a truly substantive absence. Just a few minutes, not days or weeks of disappearance or months of incarceration, or the 41 years and counting since the writer's father actually died.

[Shouts] Fuck!

He's been dead one year longer than he was alive.

[Crosses stage]

CHARACTER A

You were here when I fell asleep, but then I woke up and couldn't find you, left me all alone.

[Crosses back.]

CHARACTER B

But is that really such a bad thing? For a long time, the writer thought mostly of how he missed his father, how he wished he could have known him. And he still thinks those things, he does.

But you know what else the writer thinks about pretty often these days? He thinks of how dramatically his own odds of surviving to adulthood improved because his father died.

[Honks clown horn.]

[Someone in the audience laughs. Someone else shushes her. She blows a raspberry stifling her laughter.]

His father occasionally abducted him.

[She laughs again, briefly, and is shushed again.]

Disappeared with him for days or weeks at a time. He doesn't remember any of this, but he knows the story. Three years old and getting dragged around to all the places petty thieves and heroin addicts liked to go in the 1970s. Inevitably his father would get so high he'd forget he had a kid with him at all and just leave him behind wherever they happened to be.

The writer's mother would have to track him down like a private detective. To the home of some random family she'd never met before, 2 hours away. Or to the dilapidated building full of addicts and dealers.

[Awkward laughter in audience. Shushed.]

Where the writer's father went to score his junk and shoot up and leave behind his preschooler and disappear, not to be heard from again for weeks.

[Blows clown horn.]

[Crosses stage]

CHARACTER A

I wish you'd left a note.

[Crosses back]

CHARACTER B

He did though the writer's father left a letter for him along with the journal in a marble notebook, both written in prison when the writer was two and a half years old. The writer's mother gave them to him in 2004. She didn't keep them from him. She had just saved them until he was old enough. By then, they were packed away in the attic somewhere, to be remembered only upon being found.

Not that it matters. Even now he still hasn't read them. For over 20 years, he's left them in a drawer in his desk unopened. At least he thinks that's where they are. Does he intentionally let himself forget where he keeps them, or is it just his usual ADHD bullshit?

[Honks clown horn.]

Does it matter?

When I tell you he hasn't read them, do you assume it's because he's afraid it'll be just too much for him? That he'll be overwhelmed with emotion? Those would be reasonable, but, nevertheless, wrong assumptions, it's not how he is. He gets more emotional watching Ted Lasso than he does in response to anything in his real life.

Ted Lasso makes him cry.

[An audience member laughs.]

A letter from his dead father? Not likely.

[Clown horn.]

[She laughs again.]

Do you want to know the reason he's never read that letter or journal? He's never admitted this out loud to anyone. Giving you a real scoop here.

He hasn't read them because every time he thinks about them, he thinks about the great resource they'd be for making art. Not about hearing what his father had to say to him or about feeling closer to his father or understanding him better. No, he thinks about what amazing raw materials they'll be, how he can use them to make something of his own, something really personal. Wouldn't that be a beautiful artistic achievement?

[Honks clown horn simultaneously with "achievement."]

And he feels guilt about that. No, not guilt. Shame that his feelings aren't sentimental enough, that he just wants to scavenge his father for his own purposes to make art.

As if he doesn't have every fucking right in the world to do exactly that, as if it isn't the same damn thing in the long run anyway. As if he's not already doing it. Literally right now, at this moment, as he's typing these words right fucking here.

[He throws the clown horn off stage. It honks sadly in the distance on landing.]

[Someone in the audience laughs, and has trouble stopping himself for several moments. Someone else repeatedly shushes him.]

But still. Makes him feel cheap this impulse he has, so he doesn't read them. He gives his attention to other gifts his father gave him. Things he can treat with as much sentimentality as he can muster. All the sentimentality he can fake, all those arrivals, and every time a present.

[Crosses stage]

CHARACTER A

What kind?

[Crosses back.]

CHARACTER B

A giant four-foot tall stuffed frog that he used to ride down the stairs like a sled. Some paint-by-numbers Disney prison art. Pluto the dog. Geppetto holding the soggy Pinocchio, his donkey ears and tail dripping into puddles of blue foil. Some real irony in that one. The misbehaving boy and the devoted father.

[He takes out a pack of cigarettes, removes one, and puts the cigarette in his mouth as he continues talking.]

And there's a knock off plastic Twickie from Buck Rogers with a big red button that's supposed to make his chest light up.

[Man in audience laughs. A woman shushes him.]

But the light never worked.

[He laughs again. She shushes him, increasingly impatiently.]

That one is standing on his desk right now. He sees it almost every day.

[He lights his cigarette.]

Oh, and a couple of educational stamp books. Pages of simple facts and incomplete pictures with dotted line silhouettes of the thing being described. Two whole workbooks of absences. Find the right stamp on the full color sheet in the back, tear it out, give it a lick and bring back the thing that's missing. One of the books is about reptiles, the other about rocks. Just... [long drag on his cigarette] ...rocks.

[Man in audience chuckles. Is shushed.]

Find a silhouette of a rock, fill it in with a picture of a rock. I guess silhouettes to fill in with a missing father would have been a little too on the nose. [He laughs.]

Those books were the last gift his father gave him. Last time they saw each other before his father died. The distance he'd run across to get a hug was just a few feet of sidewalk that time. Then an elevator ride up to his Nana's condo, where his father's mother and sister lived for all the years he knew them. Did his father live there too? He never really knew his father to live anywhere that he could remember. But that's the place the writer most associates with his father. It's where he saw him most and saw him last.

Incidentally, he doesn't expect to ever see that condo again either. He was just there this past Christmas to visit his aunt, his father's only sibling. But she's dead too, now. Four days gone as of this writing.

Incidentally.

Sure.

He's had this script on his to-do list for months, but he says "incidentally." As though it's just coincidence that he finally sat down to write it in the same week that his last living blood connection to his father has died. No, no, it's just he's got a break from work. It's the first time he's really had the time.

Uh-huh.

Just like how the flavor of ice cream in these scripts is a big fucking coincidence too. Rum raisin. He had already written the template script, recorded it 40 times, and completed a dozen finished episodes before the thought hit him.

"Hey, wasn't this someone I knew who liked rum raisin?"

And he literally spent days racking his brain trying to remember who it was.

[Crosses stage]

CHARACTER A

So...?

[Crosses back.]

CHARACTER B

I mean it's obvious, right? It was his father. Rum raisin was his father's favorite flavor of ice cream.

Rum.

Raisin.

[Crosses stage.]

CHARACTER A

Oh.

[One audience member applauds. A few others tentatively join, before the full audience applauds, briefly. One person continues awkwardly applauding as the rest of the audience begins to exit.]

[Fade Out]

[Closing theme music.]

ALEXANDER DANNER

Exercises in Sound is created, written, and sound designed by Alexander Danner and directed by James Oliva.

Featuring performances by Felix Trench.

Theme music by Katherine Seaton.

Tile art by Sam Twardy.

Exercises in Sound is inspired by Raymond Queneau's "Exercises in Style" and Matt Madden's "99 Ways to Tell a Story", which conducted similar experiments in the forms of prose fiction and comics respectively.

Funded in part by grants from HartLife NFP and Emerson College.

Find episode transcripts online at exercisesinsound.com.

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Exercises and Sound is a ThirdSight Media production.