Announcer: We find ourselves in the spacious confines of stately old Hightower Manor. Ram Singh pours coffee for Edward and his mother, the Duchess of Wootzietail.

DUCHESS: Thank you, Ram Singh, that will be all.

RAM SING: Is Madame certain she is not preferring to marginalize my exotic otherness perhaps one iota further?

D: Oh Ram Singh, so silly and formal with your dark and frightening skin. Show us your buttocks.

RS: Ohhhh, this is truly degrading.

EDWARD: Mother ...

D: Edward, stop it: I can fondle whichever servants I please. You're making this whole scene feel like an A.R. Gurney.

RS: Your hands are like the bony paws of an emaciated white rat whose eyes glow red as its claws leave hanta trails in peculiar heiroglyphs across my taint to my dark and bunching testicles, Madame.

D: Indeed, foul Manservant. Such is the price you pay for dark skin and a non-Western modality.

(We hear the sound of an orange being juiced as raw calamari is tossed from a stainless steel bowl, arcing first against the wall and then landing in chunky splats on a patch of butcher paper over marble.)

RS: Well, goodness gracious me.

D: Look at the dirty mess you've made. Fetch the mop!

RS (fading out as we hear him padding away): Ooooh I am most wretched. Most wretched indeed. Naughty, naughty wretched penis-toting ejaculator ... !

D (over RS): Now, Edward, what was it about which you wished to speak?

E: Mother, the Nordstrom Quasi-Biennial Funeral Procession is next week, and I've been trying to think of an appropriate way to celebrate your inheritance of the Sacred Title.

D: So. You've finally come to bend your knee at the feet of the Queen of the Nordstrom Dead, have you? And what penitence shall I mete out in harsh judgement of your lengthy silences and overly-complex writing?

E: Well, I --

D: HOW shall I live when my every waking moment is spent in cold realization of your adolescent infidelities --

E: Mother, this is hardly the time --

D: Masturbating! To photographs of filthy naked lesbian potsmokers being ritually fisted by angry Mexican Librarians!

E (Protesting): I've never been fisted in my life.

D: No not you, silly boy: the naked lesbian potsmokers.

E: Oh!

D: To continue: Never a thought for your mother! Never a drop of your quasi-manhood spilt in contemplation of her withered, sagging teats you didn't even find as attractive as that cartoon harpie's always climbing out of cakes behind the centerfold in the PLAYBOY you stole from your brother in 1975!

E: Shall we air familiy laundries, or lawn amelie fairies? ... lawn familiy aries ... ?

D: Oh. So you've come to work in the garden.

(Sound of a trunk or large chest creaking suddenly open)

RS (from within opened trunk): But Madame, you promised me that if anyone would be lawning the family Aries, it would be me! O, She IS A Rockstar! Oceana Rockstar! Oh, she am a Rockstar, too!

D: Back in the trunk, filthy subservient witchdoctor!

(Sound of trunk slamming and locking closed, perhaps a yelp from Ram Singh. Perhaps not)

D: There, now that's done let's stroll about the grounds and argue for the legalization of Morphine.

E: Morphine is legal, Mother.

D: I know, I know! Isn't it WONDERFUL?! (Her last word hugely monstrously distorted and eerie, not like the lake)

E: Perhaps we should plant some poppies ...

(They walk off, chatting. From within the trunk we hear, muffled:)

RS: Please to be opening the trunk now. Please? I have ceased the rhythmic squeezing of my sleeping semi-rection.

(Sound: key in lock, turning, bolt release: trunk creaking open again.)

RS: Oh thank you, thank you, Sahib. There is something I must tell you. Come closer. Closer. Closer still ... (whispered:) I am in a trunk.

(Sound: trunk slams closed, with finality)

RS: Now you are, too. (He chuckles.)

END

(C) 2005, Edward Hightower. All rights reserved.