An hour later, it’s opening, what with the toetap and the slapclap, and the booing, we want the show, we want the show — how there’s no time for reflection, Ben, you’re on and we’re off, a blinding flash out there, a whole cast of what can go wrong always will, acting up under the batting of brights: a heavy velour tugged up by a cord braided and fringed, sandbagged hoisted the flag, the desert’s skypennant, backed only by a dustily footlit diaphanous veil; this musty, fouled curtain rising on a risqué oneliner, then lowering itself back down only to be risen again as another: the entire spiel here a setup (plus admission fees, the prices of food, drinks, and unmemorabilia), and all this funnily staged business with the curtains in their second coming and third only to be followed by blah, merely a punchline we didn’t think funny the first time, and you didn’t either…such tuggy yuks as delivered by a mensch they’d taken on take your pick — scrapedup from under a rock Upstate or so, from which bungalowcolony or kuchaleyn his first wife dead always said — think it up for yourself ’s what it means (that and his older birthdate, which he’s had falsified with a stolen certificate, and which are his daughters and which are his second and third wives, each of whom’s said to own land in Joysey where they’d graze their trick Arabian horses): an oldhand expert at Katz skills, he’s short, fat, and borschtbelted, a former tummler and the purplehearted, white-livered veteran of a million hundredshekel Kutsher’s gigs, at least according to his official bio supplemented with headshot ten years and twenty pounds out of date — the immediate past president of Congregation Beth Supporting Actor, too, this snubby stub of a forgotten, unrecognized, underrecognized, genius in a weathered suit and a pair of dark, plastic, feltfooted slippers he thinks passes for dress shoes, how his bunions have corns, his tongue’s lost its gift is its gift in the telling, how he tells the same lame old jokes while holding in one hand a microphone and in the other an assortment of props, nightly, depending: whether a ringmaster’s whip or a conductor’s baton, often an unstrung violin he didn’t play if he could or a feather, which is artificial of plastic itself, pink and illegally sharp; then — according to the program that costs only a shekel or two extra if you care to follow along with us at home — there’ll be a juggler on stilts, to be followed up by a stilted who juggles, stay tuned; upstaged by a mime, the juggler’s brother-inlaw who he’s just doing a favor for he’ll regret (is he climbing a rope, or milking a cow, I’m not sure, ask him yourself, he’ll flip you a finger in answer); four and five respectively illfed, parasiteriddled albino lions and tigers turning lazy, tired, halftushed loops through flaming hoops, schnorring on their other sides, stageright, for scraps of meat rebarbatively raw — though only once all have passed safe and sounding in growl through such hazards are the hazards, then, magically transformed, alchemized, from having been hoops into triangles superimposed as to form a familiar star still afire.
