Drinks Before Dinner Read Online Free PDF Page A

cheap. I didn’t know why, it just appealed to me.
( A moment of silence. The others exchange glances )
EDGAR    ( Ruminatively ) I am inconsolable! Yet I don’t claim not to take pleasure where I can. I don’t claim pleasures are not possible or desirable because everything is so painful. For instance, on a beautiful day in the city people buy sandwiches and take them to the parks to eat, or they sit in one of the plazas off the streets, one of the raised plazas or parks of the banks and corporations. And they watch each other go by. That is a simple, undeniable pleasure available to everyone. It is a precise pleasure to eat one’s lunch in contentment and stare at the girls and think about them as they go by. It is nice to see the sun shine through the thin skirt of a lovely girl. When the weather is warm she may wear such a flimsy dress that you can see the sun shining through it, so that it lights her thighs. And if the sun is really strong, you can through your half-closed eyes see it shining through her dress, so that you can see her entire body, and through the flesh of her so that you can see her bones, and even through her bones so that you can see the most opaque intimate part of her, her intrauterine device.
JOAN    What are you trying to do? Put it away, please.What is it you want? What is it you hope for? When will you relent?
( Pause )
ANDREA    But you remind me of a story of the street and it happened today. I was on Fifth Avenue and I saw a young man standing on a corner. Edgar, he was a poet selling his poems that he had written and printed himself on broadsheets. He was a poet standing on the corner along with the peddlars of leather belts and strings of beads and watercolors of lions and tigers, but he had no luck selling his wares because the people walking somehow walked too quickly to be able to read a poem and like it and make a decision to buy it as they might buy a belt or beads or a watercolor. Perhaps he could see, of the lightly dressed girls passing him and ignoring him, their intrauterine devices. But he noticed not only that the girls ignoring him but that everyone ignoring him, walking and strolling and carrying their lunch in paper bags to the park or the slightly raised plazas of banks and corporations, was moving faster than the automobile traffic in the street. In fact, the traffic wasn’t moving at all. So this enterprising young man turned his back to the people walking on the sidewalk, and took his poems out into the street into the traffic jam, and he began to sell them to the people sitting behind their steering wheels not going anywhere. And, you know, he did quite well!
( EDGAR smiles. At this moment the children are heard, giggling, just out of sight )
EDGAR    ( Playfully ) Do I hear those naughty children?
( Everyone looks toward the sound of the laughter )
    Curtain

SCENE 2
( As before. But the two children, in their bathrobes, are onstage as well . EDGAR , holding the gun, is totally absorbed in his thoughts )
EDGAR    Your poet knew something, Andrea. We have our life in cars. We eat our meals in cars, we pay our bills from cars, we hear the news of the world—so why not take our poetry sitting behind the wheels of our cars. In cars we have conversation not otherwise possible—conversation more intimate than what is permissible when, as now, people face each other. There is an intimacy of conversation in cars produced by the fact that we sit together but face in the same direction. We watch the road and see the state of mind of what we say imposed upon the road. We drive our cars down the interstate while our lives go on inside them. But this is not to say we cannot see things from cars. We become aware of other drivers in their most acute moments of personal expression. In our cars on the roads and in the streets we are made aware of the endless numbers of wills like our own, the infinite number of equally powered antagonistic wills, and apparently I am