Mireille bounded up onto the stage. “Hello, everyone, and thanks for coming,” she said. Her accent, honed over the months at home, in her office, in front of smaller crowds, had one foot in the South and one foot across the ocean. She was going for folksiness and authority at the same time, and the prospect of momentary dislocation did not faze her. “Let’s get started,” she said. Behind her a slide made a blue square on the screen. The next slide added yellow corners. “We’re all part of it,” she said, “this big United States potato chase.” The slide now showed a circular track. Potatoes with legs raced around it. “To stand at the edge of this moment is to visit the sea at the blackest moment of night, to sense the tides coming in and going out, to know that the water is breathing as it has breathed for an eternity, and yet to see nothing.” The next slide was black, though still projected as light, and then the projector snapped off. Mireille bounded up onto the platform at the rear of the stage. A hook on a cable began to descend from above. It would lift her and take her away. She would dance in the air. The last things the crowd would see before the lights snapped off were her hips, moving magically. She called our her final line: “Goodbye, everyone, and thanks for coming.”
©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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