Shaving Cream Pies

April 2, 2014 - More School for Scandal & Shaving Cream Pies

Here’s an email from Tom Nashe.  He’s always way ahead of me, but he gets ahead by free-associating – I think that’s the right term; but it's a form of sneakery. For example, reading last week’s post on John 9 (Naming names), he picked up on the reference to Sheridan’s School for Scandal and went with it where he wanted to go.

From: Tom Nashe [mailto:UnfortunateT@sadsackmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 1, 2014 9:49 PM
To: Ted Riich [crabbiolio@gmail.com]
Subject: School for Scandal

So, we have met the scandal- and sentiment-mongers of “the School,” and they is us, only they is more articulate and amusing – and better dressed.  We are by comparison a rout of tongue-tied sad-sacks.  If our stage is still that of drawing-room comedy, all the appurtenances have shrunk: the screens are too short and narrow to hide behind; when we run to get into the next room or a closet, we hit our heads on a door-frame and end up cold-cocked on the floor, blood seeping from the gashes on our foreheads.

                Or maybe it isn’t that the screens are too short and the doorways are too narrow, it is that the actors have expanded; we are puffed up to once-and-a-half normal size.  In which case, “Stick, O Lord, a wicked, holy poker up our arses and deflate us, I pray.”

The saving genius of farce is that it is mean.  It de-means without regard to status.  The high and the low and all in between slip on the same banana peels, they are hit in the face by the same pies.  Whatever their pretensions – to intelligence, talent, wealth, power – all are bags of guts and gas.  The saving genius of farce is that there is no high-minded, great-hearted, deep-souled concern with minds and hearts and spirits.  There are no high minds, only low, spongy brains; there are no great hearts, only slowly failing pumps; there are no soulful spirits only gas.  Gaaaassss.

                Then the curtain falls.

                And it rises again.  And smeared with fake blood and real shaving cream, we bow to the cheering, jeering, gagging, ragging, chortling, snorting crowd.

                And afterwards we all go out together for a beer.

                And a fight breaks out in the bar.

                And the cops come from Keystone.

                And

All the world’s a stage, and all the plays are knockabouts; the applause is thunderous, and what comes next ends and begins with And 

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