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Harper Lee tells: “It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” But I tell you, it’s just as great a sin to kill a blackbird, skybird, raven or a crow. Be you perfect to all creatures loved by God.
TIME and PLACE
A few years into the present. University town in the East.
CHARACTERS
AUGUST VOGEL, philosophy professor and author. Early 40s.
LENORE, a wife and student. Early 30s.
WILSON, Lenore’s husband, late 30s.
STUDENT
NEWS HOST (offstage voice)
SCENE 1
LENORE enters to the podium in an empty university lecture hall. Upstage hangs a cardboard sign, written and drawn in pastels and sparkles that could have been made by someone homeless. It reads: “Can you help me?”
LENORE
My mother told me: “Lenore, you must say something, to explain why.”
But do I look like I know why? Not in any conventional sense, that’s for sure.
Professor Vogel said … August said we’d all understand someday: Life is bipolar, living intensely at the peaks, and enduring the rest. Mother wouldn’t agree.
But then she’s no seasoned philosopher like Professor Vogel.
Live and let live is about the extent of it with her.
But live and let live is a piece of crap advice when a gun is at the door. Or rats are in a sister’s heart. Or you fall crazy in love with somebody you should never.
All I can think of to say is: First: Our bodies change. Our minds change.
Our hearts change. Every seven years or so, they all change….
Second: Life’s a mystery. That’s one thing that doesn’t change.
I was born a child of light, my mother says. And I’ve changed, she says.
But I’ve always believed I could return to the beauty I was born with….
And third: Some lovers can actually hear the beat of the music love dances to.
Really. August could. I could only feel it in the sunshine of his eyes….
I find it almost unimaginable how close I came to death, and couldn’t stop myself.
Life’s such a mystery when you’re married.
Life’s such a mystery when you’re gone. And I feel so less beautiful without you.
She exits.