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.”

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 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

love, memory, video

IN SILENCE

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EXTENDED VERSION:

[A woman in her mid-thirties. Soft spoken but with an expression that denotes intelligence. She holds a cell phone.]

“My mother passed away recently… and quite unexpectedly.

The first few days after her death I missed her so badly that all I did was look at photos of her… I had this weird fear of forgetting what she looked like…

I went through every single photo she was in. I searched albums, shoeboxes, my phone, my computer…

I paid special attention to the portraits that captured her in a natural pose, unaware of the camera’s presence. I would stare at those images for so long… trying to get a glimpse into her soul, into her real self… and maybe because of that intensity, the photos began to lose their meaning.  After a while, they became mere representations of my mother… lies, in a way.

Then I moved on to her voicemails saved on my phone… dozens.

I listened to them over and over, very carefully, trying to find my mother in her short greetings, in her requests to call her back as soon as I had time…

They were satisfying at first…  like a comfort blanket…

Until one day her messages started to sound artificial… I could predict what she was about to say; I found myself mocking her inflections…

I realized that, like with the pictures, I had exhausted her recorded voice…

I was devastated, and frustrated. So much so that I began deleting all her messages, one by one…

Until I got to one that was almost two minutes long… I had always skipped it before because it was a butt call, you know, an accident…

All you can hear in it is a subtle breathing and some creaking sounds, maybe from the chair my mom was sitting on.

But that day I listened to the message, the whole thing this time…

I could feel my mother in that silence, as if she was alive, as if I was spying on her from behind a door. I was curious about her… asking myself what was she doing, what was she thinking…

I started crying half way into the recording.

I cried out of happiness because I’d finally felt her in that silence. I was more than happy, I was at peace… there she was, my mother, living in a question mark… in an unwritten story.

I deleted the other messages and kept only that one.

Sometimes I play it… but not too often… I’m afraid to wear it out too.”

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

 Copyright Abel Gonzalez 2016