Today's tease

This is from my early play, The Pardon, my first produced in Portland and the beginning of a long theatrical relationship with producer/director Steve Smith at Theatre Workshop. At this moment, the action is interrupted when two characters move forward to speak to the audience . This is one of my favorite moments in the play. (This play, by the way, is set on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where I was living when I wrote it. It's the play I brought with me when I returned west. After this, a long string of plays was set in the Pacific Northwest.)

(Hand in hand, they move forward.)

FRANK: I have a gross analogy: this wasn't the first blood we'd shared.

HARRIET: That's awful.

FRANK: Harriet, you see, married Daniel while I was at the University of Maryland. I thought I was still in love with her then, so it hurt. In 1959, when we were seniors at Rutherford High, our petting had finally, inevitably, reach its (ahem) climax on a spring moon-filled night in the back seat of my '52 Merc convertible. We had the top down.

HARRIET: Were you a virgin? It's not so unfashionable to ask today.

FRANK: I plead guilty.

HARRIET: At the time I thought I was the only virgin over sixteen on the planet.

FRANK: In 1959, genitalia hadn't gone public yet. We didn't have Penthouse. We had nudist magazines filled with naked families playing volleyball, and to a person their genitalia were depicted as hairless smudges. This wasn't much help.

HARRIET: Despite this handicap we succeeded — how does one put it? — in lining ourselves up properly. I believe we did.

FRANK: Eventually.

HARRIET: I believe I told you I loved you.

FRANK: And not for the first time.

HARRIET: And did you love me?

FRANK: Of course. This was 1959.

HARRIET: Then what went wrong?

FRANK: I'm not sure. Perhaps it was the special logic of the fifties. Or maybe it was only Rutherford. Or only us. I do know this: that if you slept with a nice girl in 1959 —

HARRIET: And was I a nice girl?

FRANK: I knew no other kind. If you slept with her, then ipso facto you were in love with her.

HARRIET: Ipso facto.

FRANK: The times knew no other moral possibility. And if you loved her, ipso facto you married her. One's sense of moral responsibility was strongly syllogistic in those days.

HARRIET: Shoo-be-do-be: we were in love, therefore we made love.

FRANK: Sha-na-na: we made love, therefore we were in love.

HARRIET: Ipso ...

FRANK: ... facto.

HARRIET: Actually I felt like a tramp afterwards. I was sure you'd drop me in a minute.

(A beat: Frank clears his throat.)

FRANK: Will you marry me?

HARRIET: Yes. I believe I said yes.

FRANK: Yes.

HARRIET: What else could I say? There was blood all over his back seat upholstery. He loved that car!

FRANK: So we were engaged, and not thirty minutes after sharing our loss of virginity.

HARRIET: Very secretly engaged.

FRANK: And very secretly rehearsing, continuing to rehearse, for the real thing: the marriage bed.

HARRIET: Four months later I missed my period.

FRANK: But no slinky abortion, folks!

HARRIET: The proverbial false alarm. But it did scare the hell out of us.

FRANK: And she means both of us.

HARRIET: So thereafter we refrained from climbing into the back seat.

FRANK: But not without wall-climbing discipline, certain insatiable appetites having been whetted.

HARRIET: And he means in both of us. Though, of course, a nice girl didn't admit such a thing in 1959.

FRANK: Unsatisfied appetites lead to frustration; frustration to arguments —

HARRIET: And to make a long story short, since we really didn't want to get married quite yet anyway, we did the next best thing.

FRANK: We broke up.

HARRIET: Rationally and only temporarily.

FRANK: We were biding time until we finished college. I went away to the University of Maryland. I would date other girls.

HARRIET: I stayed home and attended Rutherford College and would date other men. Why do you say girls and I say men?

FRANK: The times were chauvinistic all the way around.

HARRIET: Then I met Daniel and was swept off my feet and we were married the summer after my Junior year.

FRANK: So ends the love story of Frank and Harriet. Still friends?

HARRIET: Still friends.

(They peck, and Harriet moves off.)