Smoking Lovely

The Remix

Willie Perdomo

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781642594843
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Poesía

Smoking Lovely 's explorations of poetry and the neoliberal city at the intersection of community and commodity. In this radically revised new edition, Perdomo shifts the poem into mostly second person, thereby further accentuating its self-reflexive and complex exploration of self-and/as-other, and of the simultaneous othering, commodification, and spectacularization of Afro-diasporic bodies and cultural forms.

MAD FUNNY STYLE

A 10-Minute Play

CAST OF CHARACTERS

PABLO: late 20s, Puerto Rican (Black, too)

SONIA: late 20s, Black

WALT: late 20s, Black

SZU: late 20s, Chinese American

POET: 50s, White

STAGE MANAGER: 20, White

MAN: 30s, wears a pith helmet

Where: A green room in a university theater somewhere in Amsterdam.

When: 1990s.

Who: A group of spoken-word artists at the end of a European tour.

	Lights up.
	Stage right is a door that leads to a bathroom. The door is closed but you can hear water running from a faucet. Stage left is the entrance to the green room. Infrequently, we hear slight static from an intercom above the entrance door. This is supposed to be a live relay of the performance but the intercom is dysfunctional. Upstage center is a full-length sofa. When the scene opens, SONIA is downstage center sitting in front of one of three dressing room mirrors that are lined with light bulbs. SONIA is in the middle of what seems to be elocution exercises when she notices a smudge in the mirror. She tries to wipe it off with a tissue. No success. She grabs a bottle of spring water, pours it on the tissue, and tries to wipe the smudge again. No success. In the bathroom you hear afinishing-up process: the rack of a towel dispenser, the drying of hands, a clearing of throat, and a toilet flushing.
	PABLO enters and watches SONIA rubbing the mirror voraciously.
PABLO	You should spit on that (throws himself on the sofa and lies down).
SONIA	Got everybody thinking you done with that shit.
PABLO	(ignoring her) Walter get here yet? I left him in the red-light district last night. You would think being from New York nothing would surprise us, right? We like to think we’ve seen it all. We just smoked a little blueberry in a café, had some coffee, and on the way back to the hotel we stopped in front of this store. Looked like one of those fortune-teller stores. I thought I saw a woman on a swing. Maybe the blueberry had me buggin’, I thought. So, we stood there for a second and there was a black velvet curtain and sure enough out of the curtain a blond woman in a red-laced bustier was sitting on a swing, swinging like she was at a playground, and right before she disappeared behind the curtain, she would open her legs, and Walt kept saying, “Look at that. Look at that. Oh shit. Look at that.” If I would’ve died last night, the last words I would’ve remembered hearing were “Look at that.”
	PAB...