Spamalot! New York City: August 31, 2005
Searchlight greets the audience like a hot yellow hand: love and law
partners, Catholic girls in mustard uniform, their chaperones curling Playbills
to binoculars. When illumination finds a politician in your section the
audience jeers at tall water, FEMA, Army Corps of Engineers. Malice is your
second attitude. What you first notice is that Condi looks dead on you.
Not just the way all women share a rue lip in public. She has your fat hooded
eyes, sparse brows. Your kinks, hydroxide straight; hers, a placid bayou.
Right there on Condi your mother's cellophane throat, Vicks and varicose
slicked. Inside Condi is there a trying Alzheimer’s heart? When the audience
boos, are they booing your mother?
The emerald curtain peels for a Scandinavian village set. You can’t read her
face in the black, but you pray she’s joyed. This scene: crude men lashing
women with small halibut. Laughter troubles the chest, a convulsed ward
hurling sound and wind to keep you hysteric. Condi is a similar lung-pillaged
city, as the women fetch grown fish to fight back.
