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.)
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Favorite scenes
One of my favorite scenes, from my early play The Pardon. The actors speak to the audience. Above love and sex in the 1950s.
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