part 4
POPEYE THE SAILOR
I played me part, see?
I ate me spinach and saved me girl
And helped the kiddies and told 'em
To listen to their parents, and I fought
For me country when it needed me.
Bluto was me enemy and me pal,
And I loved him, and he loved me.
Now, I never laid a hand on him, except
To give him a paste on the jaw, but he knew
And I knew he knew, and that was enough.
But it was something you couldn't say in them days,
So I kept quiet and kept on paying calls to Olive's house
But I only felt alive when I was scrapping with Bluto.
I was what I was.
DOLLY KEANE
Would anyone have paid attention
If I'd said "encyclopedia" or "electricity"?
If I wasn't adorably wrong about something,
I was invisible, ignored, unnecessary,
A clown even when I wasn't being funny.
So I went along with it. What choice did I have?
Through seven decades, trapped in that house, in that world,
In that body, in that face. I did my best to radiate
Ignorant, unreasoning cheerfulness
My passing was a mistake, a bid for attention that went wrong.
You should have found me in that "frigidater."
Couldn't you follow the dotted line?
FRED BASSET
This is my grave.
(I am dead!)
.
muffaro, I want you to know, as a former cast member of a Spoon River Anthology, you've NAILED the voice and timbre. Well done.
ReplyDeleteThanks, w! I take unseemly pride in these, partly because I love the original so much. There was a radio version of this on CBS, which I haven't managed to find online yet -- archive.org has a gap in their collection.
ReplyDeleteFollowed your links from CC. Absolutely brilliant! I'm in awe.
ReplyDeleteFound it! It's part of the CBS Radio Project.
ReplyDelete