And the tour entire from its opening night to this one time only it’s said, Very special engagement upon the eve of the fourth of the olden July the first of another month, also — the night of the newest moon of the month known as Tammuz, named for the God of Babylon, who’d been the lover of Ishtar and the bane of our prophet Ezekiel — has, admit it, proved nothing less than a disaster of proportions most Scriptural, whatsoever were its intentions: to begin with, the animals had been rented sick, the dye wouldn’t take, or poisoned — six sheep done dark, mortally leaded, and one heifer dripping in a puddle of its own red; the mocked up horn of the unicorn kept falling off when it wasn’t stolen and sold by the crew; then and as if that’s not enough in Indiana the unions went striking left and leftist forever, following this Marxist stuntmensch and his pyrotechnic associate who specialized in making smoke without fire turned political for the emancipation of the Hoosier proletariat; at Des Moines, Iowa, the Emezin Persky, he of “His Equally Emezin Magic Trunk (which he would always say might also refer to a more intimate organ, then wink)” refused to tour further without yet another plump plumer, a busty clovenhoofer and aspiring puppeteer he’d met then impregnated one night while on line for the motel’s ice machines and maybe she’s twelve on a good day; members of the audience throughout the Rockies, “The Very Difficult And Often Uneven” region down to the even ostensibly intelligent, aware, and worldlier denizens of Denver proper, proved reluctant to volunteer to sit in the schmuck’s trunk, take a lay, a load off — then poof out again Affiliated, afraid maybe of getting sawed in Solomonhalf, perhaps of disappearing forever; though the press would hold that their resistance was, instead, an issue of respect, finding the trick with the trunk not merely sacrilegious but unrepentant, also, of the unforgivably boring, that old outcast estate of outdated, superannuated shticky, which is to be punished by yawn, a tip of the old hat lacking a rabbit to pull for. According to our sages whose bylines buy love and whose praise is often greater purchase than money, Terrible, Unwatchable, Unlistenable, Unthinkable, too, nostalgically nonsensical — who would have thought, what with the mind that’s gone into it all: the script’s desertstale, the lighting and f/x despite the budget come off as amateur to be generous, production values pitched so low you could trip over them, a snare, a stumblingblock. A rimshot, a cymbal, a crash. And then Ben, what’s His deal, His dinging thing, what’s with it. A mensch walks into a talent agent, ouch, a mensch walks into a talent agency, ouch, next time he should use the door. No, seriously folks, a mensch walks into the office of a talent agent and sits down and says, nu, listen up, I have this fantabulous new act: it’s jokes like this, acrobatics, juggling, magic, how I’m doing all of them just by living. Here and now, that’s the act, I’m it, that’s the joke, me…whaddya think, this talking to Himself, Ben upstaging the stab of backstaging patter. Existence, now that’s entertainment. You’ll go far in this town, so far that you’ll leave town, and then you’re in the desert and futzed.
He flies high and lone up there, only to be lowered down onto a throne set atop a pillar footstooled amid property plastic fronds and hunks of foamquarried marble, from that vantage to offer His answers to questions that’d been earlier offered to select audience members, memorized by them preshow (questions asked to themselves in their minds throughout the performance, just as He’s been practicing answers, silently rememorizing what’s anyway always fed to His mouth by a device spooned into His ear) only to be offered back up to Him as if so much sacrifice, too turned and false to be accepted by even the cheap seats and their miserly gods. What did the yadda say to the blah, Ben? Knock knock, who’s there, Jaffa orange you happy I didn’t say Eden’s apple? That, and how many chickens does it take to cross what. Are sons responsible for the sins of their fathers, another goes, and its answer is yes, or no, contingent, of course, on the humors of any sins in the question, on which fathers and sons. How many crickets can outsound a heckle. Though often the answers and questions are reversed for effect, as if He’s telling the joke of a fortune: don’t bother, the audience would say all as one, or half the house that and the other, I’ll just sit in the dark, and then how He’d have to ask, humiliatingly, and with a smile that turns His glossy teeth to mirrors of the audience’s yawning and sleep, how many mothers does it take to screw in a lightbulb; and then, how the houselights would abruptly die or be killed in a fizzle, and how there’d be murmuring, too, bleats and more booing less and less sheepish — the Maestro would pad. A hook might become crooked from the wings. This is how a shepherd loses His flock.
