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Scripts Aloud brings drama right into your ears. By using text-to-speech software, theater scripts go from the page into drama, every week. Typically 10-minute scripts are presented in each episode. It's like having a Theater Festival - right on your phone!
SHORT SKIRTS MAKE
THE MONEY
__________________________
A one-woman show
By Rick Regan
March 19, 2021SCRIPTS ALOUD
By Rick Regan
Short Skirts Make the Money!
SCENE 1
Stage set like a studio
apartment, with a chair for
reading, a four poster bed, a
small kitchen setup with a
refrigerator.
WIDOW SINCLAIR enters. She speaks
directly to the audience.
WIDOW SINCLAIR
Good evening. Thank you for coming tonight. I have a few
stories, a few funny things that happened to me and I’ve got
a few things on my mind.
But first, let’s get this out of the way: I’m a woman.
(pause)
I know that will make a few of the folks here in the audience
tonight a little uncomfortable. Well, let me tell you, it’s a
little uncomfortable up here too. The Male Gaze, you know.
In the academic world of theater, there are papers and
conversations about the female body on-stage, often discussed
in the same way as Chekov’s Gun on the Wall, as in, if you
have a woman on stage in the first act, then something must
be done with her by the third act, usually meaning with
violence or sex, or both. Remember, Juliet is dead at the
end. So is Romeo but he is the main guy, he’s supposed to
die. She doesn’t have to, but the gun has to go off. She
kills herself when there is nobody around to do it for her.
Poor girl.In lived experience, the female body on stage means skimpy
costumes, ridiculous shoes and shameless dance routines.
Why I saw on TV recently a famous woman singing with her
backup singers and dancers, all women, with banners overhead
about respecting women. And do you know what they did? At the
chorus of the song, the dancers, in silver shorts mind you,
turn around, bend over at the waist and look back at the
camera to sing something about respecting women. Oh my! Oh
my. Now, I know that each of those women must have been
incredibly talented, hard working and dedicated to their
craft to get to the point where they are working with a major
star. And I am sorry for them to have agreed to put all of
that aside for the ‘artistic vision’ that made them into
little more than sex objects. But a producer once told me,
when I objected to doing the witches scene of MacBeth, played
in the nude, he said, “Honey, short skirts make the money.”
So there you go.
So here I am, big ol’ me, all dolled for you folks. I hope
you like it. I was born this way, big and blonde. And
Southern too, so that means Big Hair is part of the package,
the whole deal. I grew up in the South, the New South they
called it. Post-Civil Rights, post-The-War-of-NorthernAggression, and most certainly post-the-days-before-AirConditioning. Everywhere we lived was a boomtown. The schools
used the Air Conditioning as an offensive-tactic to get horny
high-school girls to keep their clothes on. They kept the
classrooms so cold that a sweater and long socks were
required items. In the still-sweltering August for the start
of my senior year, my mother would comment, “Honey, take a
sweater, or you’ll catch your death of cold.” I think the
parents were in on it.
When I grew up, outside of Atlanta, and then Charlotte, and
then Nashville, there was building going on everywhere, all
the time. Midwest Rust Belt? No way. Steel plants and car
factories closing? Nope. It was new jobs, new banks, new
houses, new roads, everywhere, all the time. It’s still that
way, but you wouldn’t believe it if you read the newspaper,
or FaceBook.It wasn’t until I had a boyfriend from Ohio that I saw for
the first time that the whole world wasn’t like the New
South. I went to meet his parents in Ohio for the Forth of
July. We drove, and as we were getting close I asked him to
stop at a McDonald’s so I could freshen up before we arrived.
In the Ladies’ Room a little girl watched me at the mirror
and said her family was travelling and they were from “Upper
Sandusky”. I told her I was not familiar with the place and
asked if that was near Lower Sandusky. She was fairly
stunned, possibly outraged that I had never heard of Upper
Sandusky. Looking back, I don’t blame her, but I did at the
time. I mean, was she not aware that she was speaking with a
First Rate Southern Belle? Perhaps not. And the boyfriend’s
mother was an embarrassment to him. I could see why, of
course. They lived near Chillicothe, Ohio, and if you know
it, it would be because someone you know, possibly you, has
been incarcerated at the federal prison outside of town. That
is the only reason to go to Chillicothe, in my view.
The poor boy’s mother was struggling in the New Age. She’d
grown up on a farm in Ohio and so much had changed. Family
farms became the agri-business industrial-complex, or, as she
called it, faceless-farming. When she grew up there were cows
and chickens on the farm. There had been vegetables, sweet
corn and tomatoes, they grew. Now it was all soybeans and
corn as far as you could see. Didn’t I know it, driving for
hours in the sea of monotony.
But she got married to her hunk of a man. He eventually
worked at the prison. They had young Dave, the poor boy, and
she watched the whole world change around her. She sat down
with me in the kitchen to have coffee while the men went off
to do manly things. She said she was still sad about
Geraldine Ferraro losing the year before. She didn’t care
about politics but that lady Geraldine showed that a woman
can get up and make a difference in the world. But they
pushed her right down, just like all the rest, she said.
So there you go. Having a woman on the stage means that
something has to be done with her by the end.I read up on Geraldine Ferraro and I can see how she, and Ms.
Jackson before her, paved the way for where we are today,
with Kamala. And sometimes, when the gun goes off, you get to
shoot the bad guy (Trump).SCENE 2
WIDOW SINCLAIR goes to sit on the
chair.
WIDOW SINCLAIR
I went to England for a year in college. It was after poor
Dave and I broke up. We spent the summer in Knoxville, at the
University of Tennessee. In the fall, I was all set to go to
England for a year, see Paris, maybe Barcelona. But Dave and
I spent that sweet summer together in his apartment offcampus. I had never lived with a man, of course, so I had
some learning to do. Dave was tall and gorgeous, and I was
getting regular sex for the first time in my life.
I had a couple of summer classes, I told my mother, so I had
to be there for the summer term. Before long she sniffed that
something was up. She wanted to come and meet my “roommate”.
I told her that I was sharing an apartment for the summer. I
didn’t tell her that it was with a boy. She came up from
Nashville on a Wednesday and knocked on the door. I was,
legitimately, at school, in class. Dave was there, watching
baseball on TV, on a Wednesday afternoon.
Well, my mother is a peculiar sort and she asked to come in
and have a little chat with Dave, to get to know him. You
don’t know my mother but poor Dave got both barrels of
maternal-worry and psychotic-insanity. She told him that she
was glad she had arrived when she did so that she could whisk
me away from this squalid life. She told him about the time
she was in college, at Wellesley, and one of the Ivy League
boys wanted to get frisky with her. She explained that a good
southern lady does not get tangled up in such affairs. And
she was still there, talking his ear off when I arrived.
You can imagine the storm that was brewing, two high-strung
southern belles, mother and daughter, screaming and spinning
like a hurricane. Poor Dave was no match for this. Mother
pulled me out the door and Dave broke it off right there. I
can still hear him. “I think we’d best... not”, he said.
Well truth be told, once I had gotten comfortable being in
the saddle, I had realized that poor Dave had some...shortcomings. He was a good and kind man. I’m sure he still
is. But I suspect his wife is unsatisfied. Bless his heart.
So off to England I went in the fall, with my big hair and my
suitcase. It was a minor university, not far from London. And
I loved it, I really did. I had the most wonderful friend
next door in the dorm. She was Jayne, from Watford Junction.
You’re supposed to laugh at that. In England, Watford
Junction is one of those big intersections, where five huge
roads make a big mess of the highway ramps in London, and
Jayne was like that too. She was a blonde hot-mess, just like
me. We went into The City every chance we could. We went to
Paris and even Barcelona.
But the most interesting thing Jayne said was right when I
arrived. I told her about wanting to see England and France,
and so on. She said, “Oh, your Labia Days.”
My what?
She said, American girls come to England, and English girls
go to Spain. She said Spanish girls seemed to go to Ireland.
All to spend some time with all manner, and all number, of
characters, all interested in the comings and goings of her
pelvis. In England the girls called it their Labia Days,
since that’s where most of the action was.
Now I will say up front that I did encounter all manner, and
all number, of characters that were interested, less in my
mind and my sparkling personality, and more in carnal
pursuits. And I should say that I regret none of it, but what
would be the fun in that? No, I learned quickly that I must
sort the wheat from the chaff. Poor Dave in Knoxville seemed
pale in comparison to the boys we would meet in London.
Oddballs, misfits, Punks, Rockers, Emo’s, the whole gang.
We wanted the whole menu. And Jayne knew everybody who was
anybody. You remember The Smiths? That Morrissey guy?
Charming Man.
(sings gently)I should go out tonight,
but I haven’t got a stich,
to wear.
Yeah, he got that line from Jayne. The drummer, Mike, he’d
called her and told her to come down to some show. She wanted
to get out of it because, she said, he was a bore. Jayne knew
what she liked, and that was money. She was trying to move up
from sketchy drummers, to promising guitar players, on up to
landed-gentry. It was the thing to do at that time for proper
English girls. Princess Di was on TV all the time, and she’d
done it, hadn’t she, moved all the way up to be in line to be
the Queen of England. Jayne wanted some of that. But poor
Diana. That breaks my heart. Doesn’t it break your heart too?
Of course it does.
You could see where it was going though. She was the loaded
gun in the first act at the wedding, and by the end,
something had to be done with her. So sad for those boys.SCENE 3
WIDOW SINCLAIR moves over to the
bed, sitting on the edge.
WIDOW SINCLAIR
My husband died on the operating table. Heart attack. But get
this, it was for a knee replacement. Not cancer, not a car
crash, a knee replacement. I was there when they wheeled him
in and waited for him. Two hours later they came out and told
me he was dead. It’s been five years now, and I still can’t
believe it.
We met when I got back from my you-know-what days in England.
Since I’d been around the world and was pretty sure I knew a
thing or two about life, I decided that I had to get serious
about finding the right husband. I had left, thinking that I
needed a replacement for poor Ohio-Dave, but I came back and
I knew what I was looking for, a plan to set up my life. I
realized, I could see it, that I was in the prime time of my
life to maximize my options. So that’s what I did.
The first thing I did when I got back was to transfer out of
Tennessee and into Carolina. There were bankers at UNC, rich
bankers. I had natural advantages at Chapel Hill that I
wanted to take advantage of, by joining a sorority. Of course
the other women had been there for three years already, and
here I was, parachuting in like some kind of husband-seeking
missile, Rambo in a cocktail dress. There was a lot of
competition from the other sorority women, but that was a
good thing, because the prime target men, they knew what they
were looking for, and it looked like this: either small,
southern and blonde, or big, southern and blonde. I played
that card, and I played to win. And I did.
His father was a prominent lawyer in Charlotte, with a house
at the lake. My Clark was on the fast-track through B-school,
with a focus on corporate finance. My kind of man. MMM-mmmm!
We got married after I graduated but I had my ring by the end
of the first semester.Our sorority was known as the Ice Palace because so many of
the seniors had diamond rings by Christmas. His mother
planned the whole thing, and I didn’t mind a bit. I didn’t
care if the bridesmaids wore white or red, if the flowers
were the latest fashion or if the location was the fancy
spot. But she did. She wanted the whole thing her way, and
paid for it. She enjoyed herself immensely, which is nice
because she didn’t entirely approve of me, what with my
worldly seasoning and all. But I assured her that we were
both on the same page. We were going to get Clark through
business school at Carolina and get right down here to
Charlotte when he gets a job at Bank of America, and we would
get to the business of making grandchildren for her. I said I
had no illusions about my responsibilities. There was work to
be done and I was there to do it. She liked that. We’re dear
friends now, of course. She’s a sweet lady.
But before the end, it was a Mother’s Day. Clark had been
behaving oddly the week prior and I knew something was up.
Now Clark was a big man, and I liked that because I’m not a
small girl. I loved the way he could hold me and wrap me up
in his arms like a little girl. But he was a big man, as I
said, so sometimes he was not so graceful moving about. He
tended to bump into thing, knock things over if he wasn’t
careful. Sometimes me. Well on Mother’s Day he presented a
small box, and that meant diamond earrings. They were lovely
and I put them in the box with all the other diamond
earrings. He never seemed to notice that I don’t wear diamond
earrings. That was his mother. When she turned her head, she
looked like a lighthouse flashing beams of light in every
direction. That was a bit much for me at the time.
Later that day he said he had a special surprise for me. He
presented another, larger box. In it was a silicone mold, of
his penis, that you fill with Jello. Did I mention he was a
big man? I was flustered but I thanked him and put it back in
the box. But he wanted me to make some Jello right away and
pour it into the mold. He had found a kit, online, that would
make the outline of his penis and then I could pour Jello
right in. So, to make him happy, I made a lime green one. And
I must say I came out really nice, with all the texture and
detail that I was, myself, already familiar with. Ahem...But on the Wednesday of the following week, he went in to get
his knee done, but he never came out alive. We buried him on
the Saturday and he was gone. We’d been married for almost
twenty years. And then it was over. And all I could think of
was more Smiths songs. He says,
(singing slowly)
You meet somebody,
who really loves you,
But you leave on your own,
And you go home alone,
- and you cry,
And you want to die.
And all I could do was cry, and want to fall in a hole, dig
one right next to my husband and let ‘em pour the dirt right
on top of me. It hurt so much, it couldn’t be worse than
having a bulldozer push that mound of red clay right over my
body. I cried until I didn’t have any tears left and I cried
some more.
And one day a friend stopped by to see how I was doing. Now
she is my wicked friend. I call her my wicked step-sister
because we’re that close but she’s a bad influence. Well
didn’t she open my freezer to get more ice for her vodka-andcranberry on a Tuesday afternoon, and she spotted that green
penis in the freezer. She took it out and laughed. She said,
“I guess I didn’t know Clark that well after all.” I said,
“You recognize it, you hussy?!” She laughed and said, “No,
hun, just an educated guess. You should make the whole set of
flavors.”
I was thinking about that the other day when I took a
Facebook survey and the result was “You need sex!” And I
thought immediately, I have to swing by the store for some
Black Jello.SCENE 4
WIDOW SINCLAIR moves to the center
of the stage
WIDOW SINCLAIR
When I was in high school, I was more developed than many of
the other girls. I got a job at a record store. I wanted to
know what concerts were coming up and get first dibs. The
manager hired me on the spot to run the cash register, no
experience. I think he hired me for my boobs. But it was a
lot of fun and I met a ton of great people. Sometimes bands
who were in town would come by and see if we had their
records. I had a denim jacket with all the autographs on it.
Bruce, Tom Petty, Lowell George, even the guys from The Clash
on their US tour in eighty-four. And Devo, man.
Now I look back and I have been on stage, like them, and like
here, now. And I think about how hard it is for women to just
be ourselves in the world. Why are we always a body that
something has to be done to?
I read a book a few years ago by a woman in Australia who
studies married couples. She said that the she wanted to find
out why so many men felt like they were frustrated and always
begging for sex, and wives that would rather read a book and
eat chocolate. She said that the men reported desperate
longing for contact and intimacy, trying to initiate all the
time and feeling hopeless and powerless when they were
rejected by the women. Then she said that the women said,
over and over, how they hated, absolutely hated, “the grope.”
The hand, creeping over in the bed, to grab her boobs or her
ass, or more.
The sad joke was about a man who was so frustrated by his
wife’s rejection that he said he would no longer initiate sex
and would only do it when she initiated. That was eight years
ago.
I admit that I was like that. Clark would grope my boobs in
the middle of the night, and I put up with it until I told
him I didn’t want him touching me like that. I felt violated.
He felt rejected. We stopped having sex unless I initiated
but I really did want to read a book and eat chocolate.He pleaded with me and I would make a big show about givingin, to please him. But he got to the end of his patience with
me and had called a lawyer about doing a separation. I don’t
think he was trying to strong-arm me into having sex. I think
he had just given up on me. And it broke my heart because I
could see the same thing that he saw, when I looked in the
mirror, an Imposter.
I was pretending. I was hoping nobody would notice that I was
getting further and further away from who I was and what I
wanted. I didn’t even know anymore. And when our son Cliff
went off to college and it was just me and Clark, we couldn’t
hide it anymore. So I begged him. I did. I said that I wanted
to be married, to him, and if that meant forcing myself to
have sex with him then I would do it. Even if it hurt, which
it did, and even if I wasn’t in the mood, which I wasn’t. And
I did it. He was over the moon! He was thrilled. We had two
solid weeks of steamy action. Then it was Mother’s Day.
He had told his father that he wanted to split up, and he, of
course, told Clark’s mother. She came over during that whole
thing, hinting around about it. We didn’t discuss it until,
on her way out the door she said, “You know why I have a
lasting marriage? I never had a headache.” And she left.
The next time I saw her was at the funeral.
After the crying and all the jagged tears dried up, I had to
pick myself up. I sold the big house, got this apartment. Got
rid of the grand piano. It was for show. I never played. I
got rid of the Mercedes and the BMW. And Cliff finished
college. He works for a company in Durham that does something
with BitCoin. I don’t understand it.
I have a guy who works on our savings and investments for me.
It provides enough income that I don’t have to work if I
don’t want to. So I sat down with a pen and a notebook. I
started to write. And this is what came out.
I hope you liked it. Good night.
Exits.