Savage Tales

thrift store which is not to say they have the wooden personality associated with that class of figurines. Truly I have sparked them with the life of any great character from Hamlet to Lion-O and that funny guy on The A-team (great show).
    And get a load of this, you'll like it. Especially in this evergreen hippy yuppie organic braintrust city here's what I got. It's so green. My television show is totally organic. Electric-free. Yeah, not a red cent of coal to be used in its production. Nice. Amazing? But true. How can it be? You ask. Go ahead. Well, let me show you. We run it right here on the sidewalk. Right here in the Haight, which you might think is a sloppy noisy scruffy place to have a TV show and you're like, Not in LA? And I say not in LA. Because sometimes you have to step out of the box. Get your head in a new space. And I got it all, do it all. I produce, direct, and even star in it. But you're like aha, I got you! What about the camera? Doesn't that run on electricity? It does not! For there is no camera. Wha… yes, no camera! It's a new kind of TV like in the old days they had it all live and beamed it out once and that was that no DVD sets bullshit rewind watch it again. These scenes are etched but once.
    The screen is chipped, cleared away really and the people look right in and I make them dance, laugh, fight, and spar. It's a wonderful form of improvisation like that show with the people. It's a great show, come by sometime and watch it. Feel free to put some change in my cup and maybe one day I'll spring for a camera and get this thing in the can. The big time.

THE MAGICIAN

    Which is better?
    1. To make something from nothing?
    O r
    2. To make nothing from something?

    These are not hypothetical questions.
    "What if you were to explode with blood and guts spilling into the front rows of the audience and then reappear in two places on the stage at once?"
    "Two versions?" I said. "Simultaneously? No, they'd think holograms and the like. A twin. And blood and guts could be anyone. A visit to the butcher. No, it needs to be fresher, more original."
    "How about you have the props appear magically on the stage and start doing tricks on their own. And then at the end of the show you stand up from the front row of the audience and come onto the stage to uproarious applause?"
    "Why? People want to see my face. That's why they pay the cash."
    "What if we have you…"
    "What?"
    "I don't know."
    "I don’t either. You're my manager. You're supposed to help me."
    "I know. But it's hard to be fresh."
    "You're telling me?"

    That night we did the sawed lady in half where she metamorphoses into a werewolf and then a wolf that rushes into the audience and devours a little boy who screams and people start to rush for the exits but they're sealed and what will the beast devour next? But – of course – I shot an arrow into the eye of the wolf and people calmed and I shooed them back to their seats and brought the wolf onto the stage with the help of two new assistants. I then take a knife and carefully slice into the wolf and the little boy is revealed, unharmed, all a-smiles. The audience hesitantly starts clapping and then laughing as they realized they've been fooled. And then I unscrew the little boy's head and it turns out that he's a robot. His mother screams but then looks to the seat where he had been and he's been there all along, snoring.
    I was snoring as I went through the motions.
    What was the point of all this trickery? A few laughs, thrills. And then they go home and life goes on. A few dollars and a meal for me and my family. But surely there was more.

    "What if I were to unscrew my own head at the end of the show and reveal myself to be a robot? And then strings would materialize and it would be seen that I was in the rafters…"
    "What?"
    "Never mind," I said. "Even I'm not interested in it. If only there was something a little bigger."
    "Hey, you said you wanted impact. I can get you into that earthquake charity thing for Asia."
    "Fine, all right, do that. I'll do that."
    But I would just be another trickster, performer, hack on a stage, amounting to little. It sounded like a challenge. We would see.

    The situation was a mixed bag. A huge audience, mostly there to see concerts. I was to be sandwiched between Bruce Springsteen and E-40, while their musical equipment was moved around in the rear of the stage. Not the best scenario with all of my equipment, so I had to think outside the brain