Work in progress, number 9....

LIGHTS UP
NARRATOR SITS ON A DIRECTOR'S CHAIR ON AN OTHERWISE EMPTY STAGE
TITLE:

IX
Current Events

NARRATOR: I do not understand why, but one essential ingredient of “recovery” appears to be guilt.

Maybe it’s part and parcel of the Calvinist underpinnings of American society; an insistence that you need to know that you’ve sinned before you can go and sin no more. Whatever…

When you commit a crime involving alcohol your punishment at certain points along the way will involve being lectured by various organizations. The most well known of these organizations is the monolithic M.A.J.A.F.E. [SPOKEN, “ma-JEFF-ah”], or Mothers Against Just About Fucking Everything.

PAUSE

With one foot planted in Catholic school and the other in the Women’s Temperance movement of the early 20th Century, M.A.F.A.F.E. [ma-JAFF-ah] now has chapters in every State except Hawaii, where it remains too relentlessly pleasant for people to get all that upset at anything.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or M.A.D.D., was one of the last great populist political movements. M.A.D.D. is a text book example of the potential of grass roots political action. Started by a small group of women that no politician took very seriously, by the time they became known nationally they accomplished the most difficult task of all, they changed the culture.

Before M.A.D.D., a DUI arrest over the weekend meant a $500 fine and some embarrassed laughter around the water cooler on Monday morning. After M.A.D.D., it was five thousand dollars and you prayed no one would find out. The culture of alcohol was forever different.

It happened in the early days of the new century that some members of that group, who were also active in anti-pornography, anti-music, anti-poetry, anti-tobacco, anti-anime, anti-comics, anti-theatre, anti-fast food, anti-evolution, anti-union, anti-show tunes, anti-dancing, anti-gay, anti-lesbian, anti-video games, anti-abortion, anti-Santa Claus, anti-Halloween, anti-New York Times cross word puzzle, anti-Harper’s Index, anti-literacy, anti-New World Order, anti-gambling, anti-Catholic, and anti-Islamic groups, [CATCHES BREATH] spun off to form the mother of all aunties.

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, most were also members in good standing of M.W.S. (Mothers Who Spank) and S.O.W.T. (Support Our White Troops). It is these women who are tirelessly engaged in monthly letter writing marathons, sending cards, small Bibles and candy bars to our boys on the front lines in the struggle to bring freedom to Iran and Syria as it had been finally brought to the handful of surviving Iraqis still hanging on in the decontamination camps on the border of the [SPOKEN SLOWLY WITH EACH WORD PUNCHED FOR EMPHASIS] great glass desert.

LIGHTS DOWN
END OF PART ONE
INTERMISSION MUSIC PLAYS