Characterizations …

Listen to her and tell me if, given the right circumstances, she could fit into a host of funny, maybe not so funny stories:

“So tell me, Miss Smart-aleck, did we struggle day and night to make you a better world

so you could throw perfectly good food in the garbage?

Did your poor father walk seven miles each way to earn ten cents an hour

from the WPA so you could make faces?

You should thank God.”

With this she made the sign of the cross

and looked up to the heavens.

“Now don’t get up until you eat every last bite!”

No Jewish mother could hold a candle to her when she got on a roll. When they researched eating disorders, they neglected to study the Italian/Jewish matriarch’s hold on a leg of chicken, a loaf of bread, a pot of stick-to-your-ribs stew or pasta fagioli.

Characters ...

Around and around they run in the hamster's wheel, stuffed into a trunk from the Belasco or the Majestic. Depression musicals, old black and white melodrama or the innovative and hilarious humor of comics and variety shows from fifties and sixties television.

Listen to them at lunch counters. Watch a husband and a wife, mid-seventy to eighty argue in a supermarket. "All right already, Ethel, get the damn brisket."

Hear that annoying couple as you stand on line at the movies. (Woody Allen's, Annie Hall)

From books you read, newspapers or magazines, a news flash or broadcast journals, early HBO Comedy shows, adult animation, early animation, the antics of Bugs Bunny or Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, Bull Winkle or Natasha.

You're a kid, so no one listens to your opinion. What do you do? You zone out. I must have zoned out for about fifteen or twenty years.

The best part of being a neurotic is it's all in there. Like computer chips, the sounds and images never go away.

Characters are amalgams of all the people you've known, heard or saw somewhere. When the time is right, dig into the trunk, dust off the old costumes and have fun playing dress up.

Go naked to the edge.

fOIS