Ray Clark Dickson On Tour with the Jejune Jumping Beans
As sure as sex is a theme park after dark
& all roadies are timorous & tummy-tucked,
I toured with a road company called the Jejune
Jumping Beans, hip-hopped across tundras
of broken dreams. I did a pas de deux with Madame
Bagnio whose wide hips were repositories
of subtle rhythms. I felt nimble as Microsoft Man
who wears vaporwear for underwear, happy
to flee the hospital of our Lady of Suborning Perjury.
Our entire cast, in fact, looked like we were
on loan from Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum.
We spoke a secret stichomythia (each speaker uses
exactly one line of verse) an interplay of earthiness,
tenor of the times, like our laundry, drying on hangers
in the bus like the ghost of Banquo boogying down
the aisle. Our women's leotards were patched
with Dragon's Breath, blouses pinned with purple
cornflowers from Stockholm. On we traveled, in the
blue-bevilled nighteye of our hunger, marking moons
around Uranus, vagaries of flesh, temptations of the mind,
so poor we ate sonastina crackers with Frijoles en Olla,
beans in the pot at Mexico City. Glubowski, our stagehand, carried a
l989 Polish Solidarity sausage in his trunk,
quartered a huge onion under the scrim to quicken
our diva's tears. When we parked at night our driver
Demonthenes, who was over-qualified for your American
game called Jeopardy, would lure our little dancers
we call petit-rats behind the bus's prim canvas curtain
in the back where he would emerge perspiring, smiling,
as ifhe had successfully changed a tire. As sure as Volvo
means I Go in Latin, vulva was the catchword for ancient
stage-door johnies who waited & wailed like rain-
drenched cats for the last show's ending, stumbling about
with wilted bouquets, rancid candies, their incantatory
chant for tu tu's tu tu's as if to ease the rat-dropping
numbness of the night. We'd roll on to Oslo, Copenhagen,
holdinghands with my benefactor, Madame Bagnio, who
believed in man's essential goodness while my cynicism
glowed in the dark. She tried, dear soul, to coax a churlish
serenity out of me as if all were good we'd be invited to
the Marriage of Figaro at Lincoln Center in your New York
City. She even prayed for me, an abandoned orphan,
something no one had done before. "I don't want you to
end up like those stage-door lotharios," she said, "So
insufferably lonely--or infuriate a ravening pack of animal
spirits who will eat you alive, spit out the bone buttons
on your coat." So thanks to Madame Bagnio I've tried to
sanitize my soul, light candles instead of fireworks, refuse
to visit zoos on afternoons off stage, and practice, ardently,
our pas de deux.
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