page 3

Under Exec Wood

(with apologies to Dylan Thomas)

Voice: To begin at the beginning. It is Spring, foggy dusk in the small Exec workroom. Hush, the students are all pissed out of their tiny minds, dreaming alcoholic fantasies of examination papers covered in A's, and bursary cheques with so many zeros on the end that they run off the page. But not for all, not for blind Captain Cat, waiting for the long dead to come and nuzzle up to him.

Drowned Sailor: Remember me Captain?

Captain Cat: You're dancing Williams.

Drowned Sailor: I lost my step when you failed to raise that 200 dollars for the ISC as the SRC instructed you to. Remember Captain, the money to subsidise the travel arrangements for students to go to the congress.

Voice: And Rosie Probert too speaks quietly to Captain Cat

Rosie Probert: Tell me Tom Cat, just who is this Victor fellow? Where do I find him? Where does he lurk with his travel deductions?

Captain Cat: Oh my dear dead dears, just hold on a tick while I answer this phone call and I'll fix it all up. (exit)

Vocie: Come along now and drift around the room, watch awareness flicker across the face of Mr. Pugh.

Mr. Pugh: Here's your cheque SRC

As rubber as a dunlop tyre

Damn your silly little motions

They don't bind me

Ah Victor, now just where did we put that cheque for you.

Voice: Or Mr. Waldo, drinking "a pint of stout with an egg in it".

Mr. Waldo: How about a party, lots of stout. Pay them to come in and charge them to go out. Good way of finding the money.

Captain Cat(phone call over): Puts me in mind of the last one of those we had, on the Good Ship Poverty Hop, why we must have lost about 300 doubloons on that one.

Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard: Well this one would be properly run. I'd get Mr. Ogmore and Mr. Pritchard to take care of it. They'd do a very good job wouldn't you dears?

Offstage: Yes Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard, it would be almost as much fun as those cold baths that you make us take for our health, and having to wear those pretty little flannel aprons to ward off sciatica.

Voice: Well, with that settled it looks like business is over the day; but we still wait for the Rev. Eli Jenkins to make his closing prayer.

Jenkins:

Dear Lindy though I like your group
Calls on my time are mounting
I cannot match your little troop
And keep up the accounting

A choice has come! I can't delay
Our paths must now be sundered
Pubs board must see me now away
Though I will keep it funded

It's troubled times we live in now
But Salient must keep production
An increased fee you might allow
Or a Cultural Affairs deduction

A forty buck fee would fix the matter
To boost the Pubs Board levy
It would give us the new typesetter
through the Tab is rather heavy

I leave these thoughts to comfort you
I trust you'll work them out
To you my thoughts are always true
And I'll always be about.

Voice: And the Reverend Jenkins closes his door on the Exec, though he will stay on as the accountant for Pubs board. Indeed as he says goodnight the dusk has finally settled, and all homeward tread. But no! Not all have retired. Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard is still awake, and talking to her two dead husbands.

Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard: Now dears I want the two of you to go up and talk to that no-good piece of baggage that editor of Salient, and you tell him what I think of his scurrilous article of last week...

Voice: But the two husbands have scampered off, after all there is no news as bad as old news, and once printed even false news becomes through of a true news. But see, even through Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard tosses and turns in her bed, chasing after her rebellious husbands, the rest of the village is asleep, not even the long dead on the S.S. Pisswilly come to trouble Captain Cat as he zzzzzzzzzzz.

Peter Beached it.