7903. LIKE THIS : NAIROBI KENYA

LIKE THIS : NAIROBI KENYA

'I hope you've got your dashiki cleaned.'

Ha, ha. That was the opening line. The

fellow from France had written a play,

in English, about Kenya. In the USA.

Go figure that one out. Relevance has

an extended key, if you only know the

ins and outs of that. But, in spite of all

else, she was a tall and lanky beauty,

this girl they'd sent over to read.

-

We began talking about stuff, anything

other than this junk. I told her I tried to

reach abstraction in  my writings after

she'd asked what sort of things I wrote.

I said I'd tried to write a completely

non-understandable line now for some

fourteen years, but had found it to be

impossible indeed. She agreed. It would

be so. 'It seems,' I said, 'it seems every

word, no matter how 'out there', or bizarre

the connection is, every word really does

relate back to something else, and that's

what people get; the key to understanding.'

-

'But why then,' she asked' why then, if you 

found it impossible to do, why would you 

keep on trying?' I said that was a too-closed-end

question and didn't she have any imagination

at all? Could she really be that dull? She made

a bad face, a sad face, and said 'No, not really.

But isn't there anything I can do? I really want

this part.' I said that there was not  -  I knew

already what she was trying to do; the age-old

seduction scene in the casting office, trying to

buy her way in to a two-bit part that wasn't worth

shit. I'd seen it all, and was tired of it too.

'You'd better go,' I said, 'you'd do better to just

leave now; forget everything, it's not for you.'

Yes, then tears welled up, but I made her go.