An hour later, it’s opening, what with the toetap and the slapclap, and the booing, we want the show, we want the show — how there’s no time for reflection, Ben, you’re on and we’re off, a blinding flash out there, a whole cast of what can go wrong always will, acting up under the batting of brights: a heavy velour tugged up by a cord braided and fringed, sandbagged hoisted the flag, the desert’s skypennant, backed only by a dustily footlit diaphanous veil; this musty, fouled curtain rising on a risqué oneliner, then lowering itself back down only to be risen again as another: the entire spiel here a setup (plus admission fees, the prices of food, drinks, and unmemorabilia), and all this funnily staged business with the curtains in their second coming and third only to be followed by blah, merely a punchline we didn’t think funny the first time, and you didn’t either…such tuggy yuks as delivered by a mensch they’d taken on take your pick — scrapedup from under a rock Upstate or so, from which bungalowcolony or kuchaleyn his first wife dead always said — think it up for yourself ’s what it means (that and his older birthdate, which he’s had falsified with a stolen certificate, and which are his daughters and which are his second and third wives, each of whom’s said to own land in Joysey where they’d graze their trick Arabian horses): an oldhand expert at Katz skills, he’s short, fat, and borschtbelted, a former tummler and the purplehearted, white-livered veteran of a million hundredshekel Kutsher’s gigs, at least according to his official bio supplemented with headshot ten years and twenty pounds out of date — the immediate past president of Congregation Beth Supporting Actor, too, this snubby stub of a forgotten, unrecognized, underrecognized, genius in a weathered suit and a pair of dark, plastic, feltfooted slippers he thinks passes for dress shoes, how his bunions have corns, his tongue’s lost its gift is its gift in the telling, how he tells the same lame old jokes while holding in one hand a microphone and in the other an assortment of props, nightly, depending: whether a ringmaster’s whip or a conductor’s baton, often an unstrung violin he didn’t play if he could or a feather, which is artificial of plastic itself, pink and illegally sharp; then — according to the program that costs only a shekel or two extra if you care to follow along with us at home — there’ll be a juggler on stilts, to be followed up by a stilted who juggles, stay tuned; upstaged by a mime, the juggler’s brother-inlaw who he’s just doing a favor for he’ll regret (is he climbing a rope, or milking a cow, I’m not sure, ask him yourself, he’ll flip you a finger in answer); four and five respectively illfed, parasiteriddled albino lions and tigers turning lazy, tired, halftushed loops through flaming hoops, schnorring on their other sides, stageright, for scraps of meat rebarbatively raw — though only once all have passed safe and sounding in growl through such hazards are the hazards, then, magically transformed, alchemized, from having been hoops into triangles superimposed as to form a familiar star still afire.
An interlude, featuring the Tehranfinanced, Beirutbased rapper Def Führer engaged for juvenile appeal, the edifying fun of the kinder: We’re all infidels now / How / Shut the futz up…followed up by a set from a set of Siamese Twin girlpianists, the necessarily packaged two of them the only ones on this tour not in any way faking it, having been imported from Siam itself if it still exists: they play for our pleasure two different nusachs at twinned grand pianos, though thankfully they don’t sing (aren’t allowed to) — have you heard their accents? asks the dramaturge he’s billed as but he’s really a producer, and a dealer in woolwear, hats, gloves, mittens, and scarves; this seguing into a reprise of the opening theme, initially heard scored softly for winds with flute solo amid that sitting and settling rustle (aux. percussion), now though in an arrangement that can only be described as discoliturgical, even the critics agree it’s way over the top, performed past forte and prestissississimo, keying a change to chorus accompanied by triple winds and brass with bells up from the pit’s hellacious darkness, courtesy of the mephistic Maestro and his orchestra, besamimaddled spice addicts all, doing their improvisatorily riffing best to keep those deaf, dumb, startlishly molting feathered and sequined things onstage in the vaguest semblance of together: they couldn’t take a cue if it took them, audiences have said, and it won’t — Management will…these the openers that’ve been contracted tonight like a bad virus that stills the showstopper, keeps the stars in bed and without their shiny understudies for company, makes a boy have to step in to play a girl in drag what with the blond wig and the fainting; the last cast for the last date Ben’ll do in Siegeles, baby, and ever, wherever, the end of one engagement, that is, before the eternalizing commitment that marks the end of another, tomorrow, remember, whose wedding of Him to her and the day with posterity, too, is to be private, then its own reprise the day after that for the masses, the media, with their honeymoon scheduled to rise back in the east to close the tour at the Temple — which event’s to be the culmination of Ben’s public wander: the end to this six nights a week, with two hits per at 1900 and 2200 with only Fridays off, then two shows after Shabbos, the risen black chuppah curtain of night with its three tinsel stars, and then — showtime; He’s been scheduled like this for a moon.
And the tour entire from its opening night to this one time only it’s said, Very special engagement upon the eve of the fourth of the olden July the first of another month, also — the night of the newest moon of the month known as Tammuz, named for the God of Babylon, who’d been the lover of Ishtar and the bane of our prophet Ezekiel — has, admit it, proved nothing less than a disaster of proportions most Scriptural, whatsoever were its intentions: to begin with, the animals had been rented sick, the dye wouldn’t take, or poisoned — six sheep done dark, mortally leaded, and one heifer dripping in a puddle of its own red; the mocked up horn of the unicorn kept falling off when it wasn’t stolen and sold by the crew; then and as if that’s not enough in Indiana the unions went striking left and leftist forever, following this Marxist stuntmensch and his pyrotechnic associate who specialized in making smoke without fire turned political for the emancipation of the Hoosier proletariat; at Des Moines, Iowa, the Emezin Persky, he of “His Equally Emezin Magic Trunk (which he would always say might also refer to a more intimate organ, then wink)” refused to tour further without yet another plump plumer, a busty clovenhoofer and aspiring puppeteer he’d met then impregnated one night while on line for the motel’s ice machines and maybe she’s twelve on a good day; members of the audience throughout the Rockies, “The Very Difficult And Often Uneven” region down to the even ostensibly intelligent, aware, and worldlier denizens of Denver proper, proved reluctant to volunteer to sit in the schmuck’s trunk, take a lay, a load off — then poof out again Affiliated, afraid maybe of getting sawed in Solomonhalf, perhaps of disappearing forever; though the press would hold that their resistance was, instead, an issue of respect, finding the trick with the trunk not merely sacrilegious but unrepentant, also, of the unforgivably boring, that old outcast estate of outdated, superannuated shticky, which is to be punished by yawn, a tip of the old hat lacking a rabbit to pull for. According to our sages whose bylines buy love and whose praise is often greater purchase than money, Terrible, Unwatchable, Unlistenable, Unthinkable, too, nostalgically nonsensical — who would have thought, what with the mind that’s gone into it alclass="underline" the script’s desertstale, the lighting and f/x despite the budget come off as amateur to be generous, production values pitched so low you could trip over them, a snare, a stumblingblock. A rimshot, a cymbal, a crash. And then Ben, what’s His deal, His dinging thing, what’s with it. A mensch walks into a talent agent, ouch, a mensch walks into a talent agency, ouch, next time he should use the door. No, seriously folks, a mensch walks into the office of a talent agent and sits down and says, nu, listen up, I have this fantabulous new act: it’s jokes like this, acrobatics, juggling, magic, how I’m doing all of them just by living. Here and now, that’s the act, I’m it, that’s the joke, me…whaddya think, this talking to Himself, Ben upstaging the stab of backstaging patter. Existence, now that’s entertainment. You’ll go far in this town, so far that you’ll leave town, and then you’re in the desert and futzed.