Chapter 8

DAN: This was on the ground; I guess it fell off.

OLYMPIA: Oh, that sign. Throw it out. I’m sick of looking at it. (DAN props it up)

GROVER: Meet our new friends, Dan. Lyman, Anastasia, this is Dan, the typesetting man.

DAN: Pretty fancy get-up.

GROVER: Yeah, they’re on their way back from a costume party this other friend of mine was giving and —

MATTIE: What took all day, Dan?

DAN: Strangest meeting. They decided to dissolve the group, and half of them are going to do a critique of political organizations; I said I’d typeset it.

ANASTASIA: Politics is something I could never understand.

PHILIP: Neither could I.

GROVER: Say, Dan, you’ve been turning down everything I’ve been sending your way.

DAN: I’ve decided not to type any more papers for profs, Grover, but I appreciate the effort you went to. It’s too much like a job.

GROVER: Isn’t that like cutting off your nose to —

DAN: Maybe it is, Grover. But I’d rather stick to stuff that interests me. We got this place together so as to get away from that crap, and then I started to bring the crap inside here —

OLYMPIA: You’re starting to sound just like Ben.

LYMAN: I take it the designs on these plates are all your own originals?

OLYMPIA: Philip’s.

LYMAN: They’re simply marvelous. Don’t you agree, Anastasia? Grover tells me you melted down the objects displayed in your first brochure. What a shame.

PHILIP: They were just experiments.

GROVER: While we’re on the brochure business, Lyman here was asking me if we’d be into making a second brochure, only this time the pictures would show things that are actually available —

OLYMPIA: That’s an excellent idea; we were so together when we did the first one.

GROVER: In this time we could run several thousands instead of a measly two hundred —

MATTIE: Why in the world would we need that many?

LYMAN: You don’t seem to understand how much potential interest there is in the creative work you’ve been hiding behind these walls.

GROVER: There’s a hungry public out there, Mattie, just begging to see this stuff. Could you see your way to typesetting it, Dan?

DAN: I guess so.

MATTIE: I’m not sure Ben would be willing to write the texts.

GROVER: That’s a shame. But Lyman here can compose a snappy text or two.

DAN: Who’d want to print thousands?

OLYMPIA: I’d gladly do the printing, if Barry agrees to work with me.

BARRY: Any day, Olympia. Man, I’d really like to make some of this stuff.

OLYMPIA: I’m sure Philip would be glad to show you.

BARRY: These plates really are out of sight, Philip. I never really looked at this shit before.

ANASTASIA: This — ?

GROVER: Oh, that’s just a commune expression, a type of shorthand.

LYMAN: You certainly don’t have the best light for looking at it.

OLYMPIA: Grover has mentioned that several times. We’re working on the lighting.

LYMAN: Have you ever thought, Philip, how much you might want to charge for one of these yeses?

PHILIP: You mean moneywise?

DAN: Hey wait a minute! Are all these things in shelves because they’re for sale?

MATTIE: That wasn’t my idea when I helped put them there only an hour ago.

OLYMPIA: I don’t see what’s gotten into you two.

DAN: Maybe I sound like Ben, but I have a feeling that something I don’t like is creeping all over me.

BARRY: So do I, but I know what mine’s from.

DAN: I thought we’d never reach the point of actually selling our stuff —

OLYMPIA: Don’t be a bore, Dan. We settled that question years ago and you’re being hypocritical —

DAN: What did we settle years ago?

OLYMPIA: Please don’t play the fool, Dan. You’re the one who argued most loudly against Ben on the question of selling the typesetting.

Do I have to remind you that Toni’s birth center, the garage, your own typesetting co-op —

DAN: All revolutionary businesses.

GROVER: I need a drink. (Exits right)

OLYMPIA: Call them what you like. They were set up to cover their own expenses and support the people engaged in them so that those people could be liberated from the mindless jobs done for poisonous corporations —

BARRY: Unreported to boot, so that we could draw unemployment and welfare while earning —

DAN: It’s no liberation if we transform this space into a poisonous —

OLYMPIA: You’re being so narrow, Dan. Why is something cool when you and Toni do it, but not when Philip or I do it?

DAN: All the shit I brought here in trickles, you’re proposing bringing in by truckloads —

LYMAN: Do you often have political arguments?

DAN: What do you call political? I’m talking about our fucking lives!

OLYMPIA: Dan, do you need to shout at our guests?

DAN: Sorry, I thought I was asking a question.

LYMAN: You’d easily win with me, Dan, since I couldn’t put up a fight. I’ve never been able to wind my way through the contorted mazes of a political labyrinth.

PHILIP: That’s a good word for it.

LYMAN: If you don’t mind my changing the subject, Philip, I wanted to ask about these house-shaped ceramics.

ANASTASIA: They certainly do look out of place in the midst of all those expressive motifs —

LYMAN: It’s not that they lack originality —

OLYMPIA: Those aren’t Philip’s.

MATTIE: Let’s go, Dan. I see that standards are being set, judges are being appointed, and it’s a contest I never agreed to be in.

(MATTIE exits left)