Monthly Archives: July 2016

irony, politics

GET OUT OF LINE

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[A thirty-year-old man with a hip hairstyle and clothes. He looks timid, but speaks with firmness despite his strong accent.]

“In my country you have to stand in line for everything…  for bread, for gas, to see a doctor.

It’s a way of life… people stand in line and gossip or play games, they flirt, or even get drunk.

But I never got used to it. I hated feeling like a number, one more letter in a long sentence and with no other function but to wait, and wait, and wait…

To be clear, I’m not against order or civility, but I had the feeling those lines were not really necessary, that they were there just to give us something to do, to keep us controlled and away from any subversive tendencies.

Of course, I didn’t say that out loud. They would have laughed at me… Or worse.

In the end, it was the lines that made me realize immigrating was the only way I could live with dignity. And so I ended up in this country… don’t ask me how.

I was so happy, I felt so free… for the first time. Free to walk down the street hand-in-hand with my boyfriend.

And yes, there were lines here too, but these were different. Optional. Like when you go to a place for brunch and the line is too long, so you just decide to go somewhere else.

But, the other day, my boyfriend insisted on going to see one of those summer blockbusters. You know, the kind of movies that are so hyped it’s almost a social imperative to watch them.

And we went on opening day.

We got to the multiplex roughly two hours early. We’d planned to buy the tickets and then have some dinner.

But the line to the ticket window wrapped around the block.

I asked my boyfriend if we could try again another day but he wasn’t budging.

And I didn’t complain.

As we took our place, a familiar sadness soon engulfed me; the sadness of standing in a line…  but this felt even worse, because I wasn’t waiting for bread or a doctor, I was waiting to see some movie.

I realized we were being duped by a system not much different from my country’s…

We were free to watch another movie (or have lunch in another restaurant), but we were in that file forced by the artificial necessity of being part of the hype, of experiencing, first-hand, what everyone else was talking about. Oh, and being seen while doing it. We craved to belong to something bigger than ourselves; a movie, a sports event, a concert… even voting. Something we could contribute to with very little effort.

We just had to get in line and become a number.

That’s what we did that Friday when we waited for an hour to contribute to the highest grossing opening of all time…until now.

Truth to be said… the movie sucked balls.”

Are you an actor or director interested in using this monologue? Contact us in ABOUT MONOLOGY!

 Copyright Abel Gonzalez 2016

death, destiny, superstition

AROUND THE NECK

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[A thirty-seven-year-old woman with a serious demeanor, unconcerned with her appearance. She holds a rustic necklace made of colored beads.]

“I visited the Amazon jungle about ten years ago as part of an anthropological expedition.

After zigzagging up the river for a week, we crossed paths with a small nomadic tribe.

At first, we thought they were Tupinambás, but we soon concluded they were an unclassified community… so we decided to stay with them and document their culture.

It took two or three days before we started gaining their trust. Finally, one night, we were allowed to join them around the fire and witness a peculiar rite of passage.

At the beginning of the ceremony, the tribe’s shaman presented necklaces, like this one, to a group of teenagers.

Each necklace had several white beads, as many as the years that teenager had been alive.

Then the shaman gave them bags with a hundred color beads inside. He instructed them to blindly pick beads from the bags and then string them on their necklaces in that same order.

From what I was able to grasp, red beads represented prosperous years; blue, disastrous ones; green, marriage and progeny; yellow, sickness. And out of the hundred beads in the bag only one was black. It signified death and would be the last bead on the necklace.

So, for example, if a boy picked a green bead for his twentieth year… that’s when he’d presumably get married or have a child… or if he picked a black bead for his fortieth year, that’s when he’d die.

Later, the shaman told us that the necklaces were not meant to be a method of divination or as a way to predetermine the youngsters’ futures. It was just a guide, an inexact map to remind them of some milestones to come.

Still, only a few tribe’s members understood the purpose of their necklace as a symbol. Most of them believed so blindly in its power that they would end up getting married, or having kids, even dying on the year corresponding to the order of the beads.

It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?

That’s what I thought too.

Before the ceremony was over, the shaman invited me to make a necklace.

I picked the black bead for my thirty-second birthday.

I’m thirty-seven now… sometimes I feel like I’m living on borrowed time.”

Are you an actor or director interested in using this monologue? Contact us in ABOUT MONOLOGY!

 Copyright Abel Gonzalez 2016

history, Hollywood, irony, memory, politics

REAL FICTION

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[A man in his late thirties. The liberal type, dressed casually and with messy hair. Something about him screams intellectual.]

“My grandfather was an old Hollywood screenwriter back in the forties. He only has two or three credits to his name on obscure films… To be honest, I used to think he had had a mediocre career and that he had retired early.

Later on, I learned he was also a member of the communist party, and that his political views had landed him on Hollywood’s blacklist…

Unable to get work as a screenwriter, he took any film-related job to make ends meet; production assistant, gaffer, grip… even as an extra.

According to my father, he once got a background gig in a big Hollywood production, a romantic drama, set in the Russian Revolution.  Anti-communist propaganda of that time…

My grandfather had no idea what the scene was about but, still, he put on his proletarian costume and showed up on a set that looked like a muscovite street, along another hundred extras.

There, this assistant to the director instructs them to parade down the fake street singing The International, you know, the United Worker’s hymn.

The song was banned in the US back then, so instead of teaching them the lyrics, the assistant just hummed the melody a couple of times for the extras to memorize it.

And so, when the director called “action”, all the extras began to hum the song, more or less successfully… All of them except my grandfather. He shouted it from the top of his lungs, enunciating every single word.

I like to picture him with a Cheshire grin, tickled by the irony of getting paid for something he had been banned from doing and being in real life.

It probably was the biggest victory of his life…

I’m sure he’d tell the story better himself.

Are you an actor or director interested in using this monologue? Contact us in ABOUT MONOLOGY!

 Copyright Abel Gonzalez 2016