Moonshine Serenade

Very soon after my arrival, as I busied myself preparing myself for my lobster studies, I began to notice disturbing signs of a kind of underworld existing side by side with the daylight world of the Island... Odd looking creatures emerged from the little shacks on Main Street of Victoria by the Sea; they shuffled down to the bar at the wharf. Strange shadowy figures I passed in the dark, while walking my dog, Mugs.
Mugs and I often walked alone together in the dead of night.
We bonded that way. And it often felt like me and Mugs against the world...because these strangers, my neighbours, they rarely said Hello for the first three months after we arrived; so much for the old myth about how friendly these locals were, these “friendly Eastern folk” as they say; in fact as I passed by them in the dead of night, they sometimes made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end, especially when I knew, I knew!! That they had turned, in the dark, after I had passed, stopped, and then stood watching me as I walked away.
Even the hairs on Mugs back stood on end-
Yes I quickly learn that on this strange little Island, like so many other places in the world, there was a group of strange creatures who drink alone at night at the local pubs, think very strange thoughts, hatch very strange plots, and then crawl home quietly, to transform themselves the next day into seemingly normal bank tellers with oddly shaped faces, amateur theatre directors who limp as they walk, can’t really direct but have fun doing it...

I think it was the second month we moved in that I began to hear the most outlandish stories of the most inept bank-robbery ever committed...
...two local boys from Summerside, looking for beer money I guess, and robbing “Mom and Pop’s Gas Station” (at 9 AM, opening time) and then, yes, running out of gas during their escape from the gas station.
The local police force reports find them hiding out in a farmer’s field…Steve Hunter and his brother Gary from Hampton… buried deep in the police reports is the physical description of the boys:

(Lights shift to a strange hue. He speaks into a microphone, as if an old radio report, whispery quality to voice):

“Odd appendages grew from underneath their arms, they answered questions with low guttural squeaks, and they appeared to flutter and fart when agitated…
When asked where they were from, they pointed toward the ocean, and simply began to cry.
Sargent. Moynihan asked them why they were crying. The tears ran red down their cheeks. They spoke in high squeaky voices and said:
“We don’t remember our names, we don’t know who we are, we’ve been lost for so long, and we have grown so sad. ”
Sgt. Dave Moynihan , a veteran of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for 40 years, 35 of those years located on this little stretch of red sand just east of the Northumberland Straight, most of it spent harassing homosexuals at the local park, or busting sixteen year olds for smoking grass, or a plethora of domestic abuse calls in that sexy sleazy little town called Summerside.
Dave stood in the middle of a field, he turned to his partner, and asked :
“Do you have a cigarette?”
Dave sighed, looked out over the field of potatoes, and wondered what his life had come to.
“Is this all there is...? “.
Steve and Gary Hunter looked at each other and….began to twitch…
“Could you please tell us who we are?” they said
And when the locals heard the news, they flooded in from Hampton and Crapaud to Victoria by the Sea, and gathered round and listened, in the hope maybe of someone else telling them who they were...
Their talk, as it often does, turned to Anne, and the rules of engagement:
(Pause. Lights change)

Rule # 1- -of the three rules of Anne:
Anne...
( a picture of little Anne with her pigtails appears)
... would NEVER rob a gas station”.

(Fake music comes on underneath, like shopping music, something very sappy. Again quick pace begins)

Anne of Green Gables has embedded herself so deeply into the pastoral consciousness of Prince Edward Island’s inhabitants that it’s a little like they have forgotten what evil is.
They have singular similarity to the land of Pol Pot, before the war, and before Pol Pot, who someone said spent his time...”up there in Cambodia eating lizards and bugs going slowly mad”...With the major difference that-- it’s-- a –lot—fucking-- colder --in Prince Edward Island...and there aren’t as many people...they all........ know each other...
They behave in an evil fashion; more or less as much as anyone else on the planet earth, but the difference is....they will never acknowledge this fact...
It’s very different in a place like, New York, for example; here, people are proud of it.
Proud of that evil gene!!!
People acknowledge these things. People are smart --they say! :
“Look at me! Did you see that! See the way I did that?!”
“I just fucked you over!”
“Ha! You must be fucking stupid man! Like are you stupid or are you just fucking Cahooolicc Mannnn??!!!”
Don’t be fuckin stupid man, you’re in New York...I mean wake up!!! You think I’m supposed to be nice??!!!”
“I fucking eat cockroaches for breakfast man---hey...”
(Pause)
“I’m homeless. Can you spare a dollar???!!!”

(He puts a huge fake smile on his face and keeps it there until the rant ends!)


(He waves goodbye slowly. Light change to a soft summer night. Reds and purples and yellow. A large satisfied magnified sigh! Music TBA. He speaks in a stage whisper, slowly, as he rises from the chair and walks closer to the audience, indicating the images which appear on the screen behind him)

Prince Eddie Isle, contrarily, is full of; well for now let’s just call them pastoral type people, they like sitting around in chairs on a Sunday afternoon, taking the time to look at the stars, taking the time to talk quietly to each other as the sun blossoms over Victoria by the Sea. Taking the time to... just “shoot the shit” you know? I mean at first it does strike me as a little pathetic and perhaps even tragic that a bunch of 65 year old men, many of them divorced drug addicts, stumble around their yards at 5AM shouting “Part-eh!!!” “Part-ehh!!!” But I get over that. I begin to see that there is something very valuable, very rich, in the fact that they often just talk about nothing, and enjoy talking about nothing, and really seem to love puttering around in their gardens... tending their tulips, and petunia’s, and their marijuana, and talking about nothing.

(A map of the town appears, vibrant)

Victoria is on the Northumberland Coast, facing the mainland. It is composed of one Main Street, two side streets, one cross street to handle all that cross-town traffic..and most significantly .a tiny blade of grass approximately one inch tall which is located five feet up from the cross street...on the left side...
This I called “My most favourite holy blade of grass”.
The Island is essentially a million acre potato farm with one hundred and thirty thousand residents and this state of affairs requires a lot of fertilizer. My blade of grass was the one untouched blade of grass on the Island. I watered it even in the dead of winter, and, strangely enough, it was always there. It flourished. My dog Mugs pissed on it but I considered that something along the lines of dipping one’s fingers in Holy water before church.

Excerpt "Moonshine Serenade". Work in Progress

Lights go to black. The sound of loud bubbles. Music is Ry Cooder “Ely Nevada"—Demo version live from Blueberry Nights. Lights back up. He wears dark sunglasses, pops open a beer which he retrieves from behind the toilet. The bottle of moonshine sits waiting.

(Pause)

"It’s funny how it happens.

At first it is innocent stuff...harmless chatter and gossip, and Terry and I sitting on his porch getting to know one and other in that "manly" way that "manly" men do in these "manly" country towns. Over a few dozen beer.

Terry was born just before World War Two, reached his twenties during the age of flowers and love. And I soon found out that he... really doesn`t remember the 60`s.

His hair is still long, but it’s thin. He wasn’t born on the Island, so lacks the Island accent, but he does have a Northern Canadian boy accent, marred by a kind of permanent slur, which of course masks the fact that the guy is incredibly bright, kind of like one of these backwoods geniuses? He drinks beer like its water and whiskey like its desert, and one night in summer, high summer when the cicada’s buzz the tops of telephone poles like hysterical wives ...

The... Moonshine.... comes... out.

The Moonshine starts, unbelievably, tasting really, unbelievably good. Especially by the fourth month. My wife is at home, and she is becoming....disappointed with me, but it won’t be the first time and certainly not the last. I of course blame Terry. Nightly.

Terry has spent years out on the vast deep blue Northumberland Straight all on his own, night and day, rain or shine, hauling 300 pound lobster traps full of weeds up from the depths and pulling a few mythological deep sea creatures into his brain along with them -- He comes into your kitchen, sits down, and then just stares at the wall without saying anything, for hours…..then, unpredictably, at any time of the evening, he moves toward the wall as if moving into a dream, his body contorting into shapes which seem an odd mixture of Tai Chi, some kind of ancient lobster fishing technique, and some weird kind of tantric sex, all rolled into one.
The only thing that snaps him out of it is a shot of moonshine.

REAL MOONSHINE.

This was the real thing folks- Prince Edward Island Moonshine….not the nancy pancy stuff. It’s illegal, but every second corner store in PEI, along with regular things like butter and bread, sells these big 20 gallon tubs of molasses. For making cookies I guess.
If you think of gin as the devil... this stuff was his twin brother, the one who fell from the sky after Beelzebub, deformed and with a real sense of antipathy over his brother’s success.

(He speaks through a loud megaphone!)

“Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire”

Fire, this stuff was fire. If you drank even half a bottle of this yellow, thick rancid fluid at night, ONCE, you woke up the next morning with delirium tremors, a deeply paranoid feeling that you were going slightly mad, and a feeling, deep deep in your bones, that God… truly might be… dead. Couple this mental horror with a physical feeling very much like spending the night in a blender with a large group of angry ancient mescaline medicine men, then being dumped into a toilet, wretched on, shat on, pissed on, and then flushed into the Hudson, and you’ll get a good idea of what I’m talking about.

(Pause. He takes a drink.)

I grew to like the stuff.

My aging body didn’t. But I did. That’s the great tragedy of being alive really. Or part of the great tragedy. But we only have an hour, so I had to make some cuts.

Poormouth Theatre Fundraiser

The fabulous Poormouth Theatre is having a fundraising evening Saturday October 1st at An Beal Bocht in the Bronx, New York, featuring many extraordinary new Irish American writers as well as old veterans like Don Creedon and Colin Broderick. They have seen fit to generously invite the Canadian Irish contingent as well, so I will be reading from my new play Moonshine Serenade that very evening, and enjoying some tasty American IPA and equally delicious Irish Whiskey. So come one, come all, unless of course you are busy monstering up in Halifax. Me? I've been too busy enjoying Greenwich Beach with my wife and dog.

Onward And Upward...gladly!

In Portland, on the way back to New York to see the boys from Poormouth Theatre about reading and doing my new play Moonshine Serenade. Looking forward to seeing the New York Irish contingent again- sans bullshit, sans pretension...just good and talented boys. What a rare combination. So tired of working with amateurs.

Best on Broadway

I'll use this beauty for my own devices!!


"I, Rooster John Byron, hereby place a curse
Upon the Kennet and Avon Council,
May they wander the land for ever,
Never sleep twice in the same bed,
Never drink water from the same well,
And never cross the same river twice in a year.
He who steps in my blood, may it stick to them
Like hot oil. May it scorch them for life,
And may the heat dry up their souls,
And may they be filled with the melancholy
Wine won't shift. And all their newborn babies
Be born mangled, with the same marks,
The same wounds of their fathers.
Any uniform which brushes a single leaf of this wood
Is cursed, and he who wears it this St George's Day,
May he not see the next."

— Jez Butterworth (Jerusalem)

Now ya know who I'm sending that one to, don't ya boys??

"Don't explain. Don't complain. Get even." JFK.

Oh, I always keep my word Pops!

Moment for Mr. Beckett

Irish school administrator, to Samuel Beckett who was teaching at the time:

"But, Mr. Beckett, these children are the cream of the crop!"

Samuel Beckett:

"Yes. Very rich. And very thick."