Aphrodite

I’m afraid that at my wedding, they’ll do the Chicken Dance.  A wedding is the only place where the Chicken Dance is acceptable.  If the Chicken Dance came on the radio, you’d be like—‘What is this awful song?  Make it stop.’  But at a wedding, anything is possible.  The Chicken Dance.  The Electric Slide.  The Hully Gully.  Songs that have been lost to time and space are resurrected so that spinster aunts and chubby uncles in suspenders can shuffle around with a half-smile on their face, dancing for the first time since the last wedding they were at.  Shucking off the dust on their joints so they can flap their arms and wiggle their posteriors.  I’m afraid that’s what my wedding is going to be like.  We’ll have the chicken dance, and stuffed chicken, and bad toasts, and white tablecloths, and pictures by man-made ponds and miniature waterfalls, and ugly dresses on the bridesmaids and that offensive photo of the groom trying to escape prevented from doing so only by his groomsmen and a DJ named Steve and a friend from high school named Connie and…and…and Apollo.

I’m afraid he doesn’t love me.  And I’m afraid that if he does, it won’t last.  Or that my love for him won’t last.  Or that we’ll get used to each other.  Or that we’ll never get used to each other.  Or that I’ll gain weight.  Or that he’ll go bald.  Or that I’ll gain weight AND he’ll go bald.  And some people look good when they gain weight and some people look good when they go bald, but I won’t, and he won’t, and we’ll look at each other like ‘Who are you?  Who ARE you?  Who did I marry?’ and I’ll hear it—The Chicken Dance.  And I’ll know that I didn’t have the perfect wedding, and that that’s where it all went wrong.

John Henry

There’s a word you all use these days that we didn’t have back when I was just somebody working on a railroad.  Problematic.  We had problems, sure, but they were nouns, not adjectives.  Back then things were problems, now things are problematic.  The trouble is, you can fix a problem, but if something’s problematic, you gotta change what that thing is to fix it, and keep it intact at the same time.  A problem you can smash with a hammer.  Destroy it.  That’s easy.  Change ain’t easy.


You know what I wanted to ask Athena?  Out of every dancer here, why did you ask me to kill Apollo?  Because I’m the black one?  Does that make me the scariest one?  The most intimidating?  Or just the one you think you can buy?  Did any of you think about that?


See?  It’s problematic.  People don’t listen anymore.  They don’t see what’s right in front of them.  Or they see too much, and sometimes that’s even worse.  They pick a word out of a sentence and say ‘What does this mean?’ while meanwhile a train’s comin’ down the tracks and they can’t even hear the engine roar.


People know who I am because I took on a train and won.  I beat back technology.  Then I died.  My heart gave out.  So really—the train won.  Technology won.  Oh, they don’t frame it that way when they tell the story, but that’s the truth, isn’t it?  Look around.  The locomotive went right over me, didn’t it?  What we’re doing here at Americana—taking off our clothes—that ain’t just to get your money.  That’s to get your attention.  This here’s the only theater in town where people got their eyes glued to us and they ain’t thinkin’ about checkin’ their phones once the show is over, or whether or not they got an e-mail while they were here, or who they’re gonna hook up with later, because the only people they wanna hook up with is us.  These days, if you got a story to tell, you better take off your clothes while you’re telling it, otherwise you’re likely to be ignored.  Forgotten.  You see what I’m talking about? 


I gave up my life to buy y’all some time.  So you could figure out how you was gonna keep that locomotive at bay instead of letting it plow you down, but it looks like y’all hopped on for the ride instead.  Well hey, that’s your choice.  But it seems to me like we got ourselves a problem, whereas y’all just think it’s problematic.


A little piece of advice—you can’t change a locomotive.  You just gotta stop that thing dead in its tracks.