Tales from the Cooinda Cycle: Memory Ten

The idea was ludicrous, I don’t know why Preacher Man suggested it. I was still reeling from the very idea of it, that I didn’t take much note of the next part of the conversation.

A puppet comedy act… for the residents. It just won’t work, not even a little. Most are deaf and some might think the blue-haired monster puppet is real and come to take them to the great beyond!

“Uh?” I said, broken out of my thoughts. “What’s that?”

“Would you also want to do that for the talent show, or do you want to do something else?”

Talent show… what in the actual hell loop is going on here.

“Wait, we’re doing a talent show?” I asked. “When?”

“Not sure, but it’s something that we could organise at some stage,” said the activity organiser for the centre. “But would you two like to put on a puppet show for the residents?”

I looked at The Young Man, as he was being thrown into this just as much as me. The others were all going to be doing something with the residents, like crochet, and singing groups, so apparently we needed to do something extra too.

Why puppets though, I could throttle the Preacher Man for his careless words.

“Oh he can do puppets, you’ve even got some really good ones don’t you?” he had said minutes before, forever altering the course of my sanity and love of puppetry without a care in the world.

“I guess, if you’re up for it,” I said to The Young Man. “After all, you’ll be the one facing the audience, I’ll be hidden behind my stage.”

“...Okay, we’ll do that.”

“Good, so next week for the first one?” said the activity organiser.

“Um, maybe two or three weeks to give us time to figure out what we’ll do and learn it,” I said.

And so it came to be, three weeks later we were in the small room used as a Chapel in the centre, and I was behind my puppet theatre, wielding my large blue monster puppet dubbed ‘Stan’ and performing classic skits and double act material, alongside The Young Man.

It’s so quiet out there, not a single laugh so far… maybe there’s no one there?

“But why did the front fall off?” asked The Young Man as we neared the end of the skit.

“Well a wave hit it.” I, in the guise of Stan the puppet answered.

“A wave hit it?”

“A wave hit the ship!” I said once more with gusto.

“Is that unusual?” he asked.

“Oh yeah, at sea? Chance in a million!” The puppet said to the reaction of nobody in the room.

If there was anyone in the room, maybe this is a dream… a nightmare, surely if the room was empty The Young Man would not have started doing the skits.

We got to the end of the Clarke and Dawe skit we adapted for the use of our puppet show, and hit the final punch line.

“Can you book me a taxi home?” I asked through the felt mouth of Stan.

“But didn’t you drive here yourself?” asked The Young Man.

“Well, yeah, but the front fell off.”

The joke wafted into the air and like someone with IBS in a hot tub, was clearly not welcome. There was just silence, not a single chuckle, giggle, or even sigh of confusion.

Okay, I don’t think anyone is there and this was just a prank to make me perform a puppet show to no one.

“That’s our show everyone, we hope you enjoyed it,” said The Young Man.

There was a very soft round of fragile hands clapping, and then the shuffling of chairs as people left the room.

I’ll be a puppet’s proctologist, there were people in the crowd!

For reasons unknown to science and even possibly outside the remit of God’s understanding, they had us perform two more shows of similar material over the next month and a half.

The reactions did begin to improve, except in the second show where one resident had some form of Vietnam flashback at the sight of Stan the blue monster.

However I’m not sure if the more positive responses were because they understood the jokes more as we did older material or because they felt sorry for the man in his 30s squatting behind a small puppet theatre with his hand up a blue furry monster.

The Young Man escaped the centre shortly after the third performance and so there were no more scheduled, however before The Young Man and a few others were set free, we were required to put on the talent show.

I managed to get off fairly easy in that and just performed some Shakespeare monologues, as it gave me an excuse to learn them, and I figured it might actually be something the residents know, I mean some of them were probably at the original performances…

The first was the ‘All the World’s a Stage’ speech spoken by Jaques in As You Like It.

Then after some other performances, including a magic show by the Preacher Man, and a ‘synchronised swim dance routine by the Rice Sandwich Trio, I returned to the ‘stage’, That is to say, the middle of the dining hall with tables and chairs put to the side, and recited a monologue that I believed captured and summarised the cycle we were all in, and that only the lucky few would ever escape. From Act V, Scene V of Macbeth, spoken by the titular character,

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.”