Abas & Imas, applause, allages kinder, I give you — Benjamin Israelien. Violins verklempt in unison. Just lunaticker as His head peeks over the stage then above the audience as if a heavenly what, not a sun, not a moonstar, just a — thing, outlined round and piffpuffily inflated, even if only shadowed from behind an illuminated screen, an exteriorized veil, this stark antependium. Good evening, New York. God Bless You, New York, and God Bless the United States of Affiliation, gevalt. And throughout all this intro — a drumroll, please, the house lights dimming down; brass roaring up, a throb of late German Romanticism; its seven trumpet fanfare executed by a snatch of Local 802 Satchmos, uniformed in smoky tuxes and tented satin yarmulkes kinked to hold, numblipped, shakyfingered on the valves. A screen, it’s smoked over our eyes…it’s been said: the screen is the eye of God and we are all looking upon Him and seeing only us, then soon listening and hearing us, too, our last reassuring murmur, roundly smattered applause — it’s a movie, a moving walkie talkie. An explosion, and can’t you almost feel it how loud and how huge. Rapidly cut scenes of the holy insaned, sootrobed forms in mad escape from the falling height of skyscrapers, flame and ash and the swandive of window glass, the whirr of sirens surmounting the whiz of fighter aeroplanes above; firefighters below, cradling newborns suckling thumbs, swaddled saved in the folds of the new twotone flag (black & white or blue & white, it’s both the same without color; He can’t be sure of anything; it’s dark, it’s the veil), a standard being raised everywhere lately, in this stadium, above this lesser Garden. Hatikvah’s sounded in a new arrangement, solemnly heavy on the schmaltz. An anthem without a country to call its tune, saccharine and slow. That’s the Q. for the pan out. It all pans out in the end, nu — to shatter the fourth wall, which is the brick blindfold tied over the eyes and ears of the audience, the veil of our own disbelief…as a knighted actor, Sir what’s his face, was also in what’s its name, with her you know the one I’m talking the redhead and, between me and you now doing hackwork, nude mostly and with outlandish accents for free money the whore the prostitutka, her exhusband’s exboyfriend playing Israel Israelien doneup in a doublebreasted beige suit with undone silk tie patterned with the two stripes and a star straight off the rack of the last casualwear warehouse left in the Empire State, he’s staring hard summoning his method, descending into the depths of his own loss, divorce, disappointment, addictions Rx, why, and zee to gaze forlornly into the void of his son’s, his only son’s bedroom and
Take 1…ACTION!
I am your father.
Cut.
Take 2
I am your—
Cut.
Take 3
I am—
Cut.
Take 4
I am your fat—
Cut.
Take 5
I—
Cut.
Take 6
Cut.
Take 7
