blend of comedy, satire and mystery

‘Another day another dollar’ echoed down the hallway of Highbury Theatrical Pyrotechnics Incorporated, a deceptively bold name for a company canavsing ‘inventive and flamboyant stage effects’ to countless dramatic productions destined to a heavy shower of forecastable failure at a the box office. I pondered on the thought, which somehow bellowed forth between the seemingly air tight enamels wedged between Dwayne’s unnecessarily large gums. It could mean only one thing. Our latest contract, a shakepserianesque play called ‘The Rising’ by Cohen Kohanim had gone into liquidation after a respectable three weeks and twelve days from its opening night.

It was a shame really; it was one of The Globes punchier productions, involving a gentle manipulation of history that allowed the self-concious protagonist, Kurtz Henrich Hitler, as chief commander of the fourth riech, and overseerer of the Ayrian Kingdom to avenge the war crimes of his father Adolf. A man who like so many other burkha wearing men became a shadow of his former self, brandishing his name into disrepute through a contoversial conversion to Islam brought on from a tumultuos decent into senility. That dastardly mental infliction professed by the last batallions of the underground ‘Renegades for Conventional Religion’ as being the thinking mans last hope for salvation.

Despite HPI’s bonus package of pyrotechnics, which engulfed the stage with an implosion of theatricality as necessary for any respectable play wishing to detonate 1 kilogram of semtex cunningly concealed around the crotch of its protagonist, the critics failed to be impressed at the final fall of the curtain. Although ‘intruiged’ by Kurtz's uplifting obliteration of the nazi cabinet duirng a lacklustre session of commanders question time, apparently it was Kohanims writing, as oppossed to his daring vision, which led the production team tumbling down the slippery slope to the dole office. One of the more favourable reviews, stated Kohanims flamboyant rheotric was spun with all the integrity of a child molestors charm, but as they seem to say in this business, that’s no great matter for with another day lingers the potential clasping of a another man handled dollar.

HPI was on the up with growing success, and what is less widely advertised but silently hoped for in this business, is the quick turnover of an embryotic stage production by the unscrupulous, but undeniably talented managing director, Dwayne Chenovile. Afterall, what good is a company that designs stage effects if every play lingers like a decade long festering smell, of the sort commonly found around the stalls of Andrew Loyd Weber’s west end monopoly board.

That day I quit my job not knowing what I was going to do, with a youtful aspiration balancing on the hope that there was something more to be had than a life of mediocrity and routine; that there was a life of experience and being, so often thought about but never enacted for the fear of judgemental futility. But what does a nine to five and the deeds to a house add up to after 60years spent behind a desk dedicated to lining the pockets of someone you had neither talked to nor cared about? Not much is what. So there I was, no job and two weeks until I had to pay next months rent and with one rare, exhilirating opportunity to use the £7030 stashed in my bank account to do with as I pleased. It was a modest, but playful slice of equity released from a quick fire decision to slip from the chains of a 25year morgatge. I was not as naieve to think i could discover any meaning behind our races parasitic lives through my journey, but so dearly desired to be one of those rare, noble individuals who have a punt at living one.

40 years have passed, and now the time has come to leave my inheritence for the future generation, a recording of what I did with my single shot at life, which has value inso much as it is more interesting, all beit just as insignficant as a cheque enclosed within my last will and testament. Out of those forty years, only one event seems to draw my attention back to a hollow vacant stare like the kind worn by a washed-up drunk who sees life as a stream of pictures without the sound. And that’s Mariel –dinkle my delight– muther fucking Jones. Mariel was a two bit crack whore that dwindled my greatest fortune in a deception as cunning as Christ’s last showstopper on the cross. Y'know the one that had the crowds screaming for an encour, and makes harry houndini look like a rabbit jumping out of hat. Well, in Mariels game I was the rabbit, and stew was just about to be put on the menu.

The fact Mariel was neither a crack whore, or indeed a whore of any type, is neither here nor there. But what does matter is that she exuded an intoxicating air of radient exoticism that had made me want to girate against her fleshy frame from the get go. And indeed, most treacherous of all, was the mocking realisation that she knew all this from our very first, fateful ‘hello’.

It was a frosty evening, from what I can remember and id walked into Acrobats; a bar where the extra actors and actresses of the west end gathered at the end of the day after two shows of pupeteering to a script full of lines. Lines once fresh to their enthusiasm and fruitful with the hope of greater things in the now distant years and months prior to the rut they were filling full with whisky and rum. It was abar where a man could think, and the perfect place to say farewell to an industry that I too had once loved. But far from saying farewell that evening, little did I know I was just about to be sucked into a magical world of glitz and glamour, spiked with the rush of intoxicating sparkle and seduced by none other than Miss Mariel Jones.