Prank Night

...flowers in her hair, flowers everywhere....


"To Brunch," we toasted last Saturday night. The Limey didn't understand, and we didn't explain. We were too busy laughing.

The Prince has accepted Sparkey's Manhattan cherry and is working the stem in his mouth to knot it, which is, yes, hot, and he knows I think so, so of course it's deliberate.

He's never nice to me in public.

Tiberius and I greet one another affectionately in the parking lot. He rolls a smoke for me while we plan our treachery. I will enter first, introduce myself as Terry from the Bud Basket, and look for the victim, er, recipient of my bouquet.

Tiberius, also named Terry, but from the Daisy Chain, enters with another floral arrangement. We trade barbs; he announces his is a SINGING floral delivery, and we fall to, destroying both bunches of chrysanthemums.

The cast does not know we are crashing the show.

We wind up doing a wild chase through the audience, beating one another with our bouquets, whacking the Limey-cum-investigator in the process, and generally cutting up in a distractingly funny manner until we're both thrown out of the room.

"I haven't laughed that hard in MONTHS," says BuddahPat. "I had to hide in the corner." Snoopy hasn't joined us for beerage, so his nonplussed reaction at the moment of truth stands as his sole contribution.

"I didn't break once this time, until you two barged in," scolds the Prince. "And then I almost fell off my chair." "I missed it all, I was dead," mourns Mimic, who received "her" battered bouquets with delight after curtain call. But wait, there's more: "At the end, he pulls the gun on me," says BuddahPat, still shocked. "And then he FIRES. I thought, what do I do now? and figured the simplest thing would be just to die."

Coco just grins and grins. It's been a long time since she's pulled a prank on her cast.

We know, and the murderous medium in which we work insists that we remember, that we are one small step from death at every moment. So we love each other fiercely, tell each other often, and work hard to laugh ever harder. It doesn't do to take life seriously: we'll none of us get out alive.

(The Rain, The Park, And Other Things; The Cowsills, 1967)