SECOND DATE

A man came to my show with a woman not quite his age. They sat in the front. He looked familiar. She did not. I believed that he had attended before, maybe more than once, accompanied by a different women, maybe more than one. The show, titled “Block Party,” consisted of myself, a table, four large blocks of butternut wood, and several knives. I opened with a greeting. “Hello, Blockheads,” I said. As usual, half the crowd cheered and hooted. The other half responded with our secret signal, two hands in quick vertical parallels, then in quick horizontals, signing a block. I followed with an explanation in dual definitions. “Who knows the difference between carving and whittling?” I said. “Both involve the application of a knife,” and here I selected the one nearest to me and held it up to the audience (for maximum contrast, I wore a yellow shirt and used knives with a deep-purple handle). I went on, sticking to script: “I was taught that the difference lay in the product, that carving resulted in shapes while whittling was a progressive reduction in the size of the block resulting from the shaving away of thin slices of the wood. This is not true. In point of fact, carving requires a complement of tools in addition to knives, including but not limited to chisels, gouges, and lathes. I will be whittling. I will be whittling shapes. For my first shape, I have selected a block.” Here I touched the knife to the closest block. “I am finished.” I said. At this, the woman in the front stood. “This is a trick,” she said, more loudly than I expected. “This is no more than a cleverly worded excuse to take our money. I paid seventy dollars for these tickets.” The man put a hand on her back. “We paid,” he said. She wheeled on him. “No,” she said. “I paid. My credit card, my hard-earned wages, my hours spent breaking my back at the nursery, dragging heavy plants to bored suburbanites who change their mind and leave without a word. And you take me to one dinner that you put on a company card and what, suddenly we’re life partners?” She crouched, and he must have thought she was going to sit back down, because he relaxed, but instead she bounded onto the stage and went for the knives I was going to use to turn the other blocks into Penguin, Bonsai, and Child’s Birthday party. I didn’t stop her. I was curious to see what would happen, above all because it was free.

©2020 Ben Greenman / Stupid Ideas