KIDS’ MOST-ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT ELECTRICITY
Answers to Questions Kids Might Ask GE Mascot Reddy Kilowatt During His Tour of American Elementary Schools
Q: Is that light-bulb head supposed to be cute?
A: You’ll have to ask my designers, but I believe it’s supposed to be indirectly educational.
Q: What, as if we never saw a light bulb before?
A: Not everyone has had your advantages.
Q: Why are your arms all crooked?
A: They’re bolts of energy.
Q: Do you have a penis?
A: No.
Q: So, are you from outer space or what?
A: No, I’m just a drawing.
Q: Can I get a suit like yours?
A: You wouldn’t be skinny or zigzag enough to wear it.
Q: I know fire isn’t exactly electric, but what about flame throwers? Or bazookas? How about bombs? Are they electric? Or are you just to help Mom’s blender make yogurt shakes for babies?
A: All the things you mention have electric components.
Q: What about those giant robots that Godzilla fights? Are they alive?
A: As a form of brute nature, I’m unqualified to comment on the dramatic arts.
Q: Is it satisfying to flow through the body of a condemned killer?
A: No, I’m emotionless. As lightning, I strike innocent forest rangers and prairie housewives, too.
Q: What happens if you touch water? Do you die?
A: Electricity does not conceive of its own cessation.
Q: What about “sexual electricity”? Is it really electricity?
A: I’m answering children’s questions only, sir.
Q: They always show atomic energy with big muscles. You must be jealous, huh?
A: I don’t get a chance to look at other drawings.
Q: Why is it we get wax in our ears and snot in our nose? Why not snot in the ears and wax in the nose? Why not the same thing in both places?
A: That’s a biological matter, to which I’m indifferent. I only seem to live.
Q: So if I waste electricity, like, by leaving the lights on all night, do you go lie down somewhere and weep?
A: No. You’re thinking of Christ.
Q: I don’t think you’re neat. I think you’re queer.
A: That’s not a question.
Q: Let me get this straight. Does it mean your nose and your stomach and your gloves and all of you are made of nothing but energy?
A: Believe it or not, kid, so are you.
BARTLETT’S FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS: THE PLAY
(The scene: A dingy, threadbare apartment not unlike the Kramdens’, in a quietly desperate neighborhood in a city not unlike Brooklyn. It is a dreary dawn, about six a.m. On a couch in one corner of this room, which serves as both kitchen and living room, lies a figure in a dressing gown with a newspaper over his face. He is barely noticeable and may go unnoticed until he first speaks. After a few moments, HATTIE enters, looking haggard and sleepless. She has been up all night, and although she may be pretty at her best, the dark weight of thirty-plus years of trouble besets her. She glances at the wall clock miserably, and grimaces at the sound of reckless garbagemen in the street below. She coughs, a serious hacking cough, and limps to a rusted dryer in a far corner. She opens its porthole door and pulls out a wet shirt from among a tangle of still-damp laundry. She wrings it out and water trickles to the floor. This is the last straw. She weeps.) (From the next room a toilet is heard flushing. HATTIE pauses. Several seconds pass, and PLATO enters. Yes, he wears the robes of classical antiquity, but here he is a pretentious freeloader, a smug dignitary assured that his hosts are honored to have him. He stretches and peers out the window, over the tenement rooftops, at the rising light.)
PLATO: The morn!… Look you … furthers a man on his road, and furthers him too in his work!
(HATTIE stares at him in bewilderment. After a few moments, she cries afresh.)
By suffering comes wisdom!
(She does not respond, but turns away from him. The clock strikes six.)
It is for the doer to suffer!
(HATTIE rolls her eyes at this platitude, stands, and awkwardly tries to hang the wet shirt up to dry from a curtain rod. PLATO gives her one more axiom as she struggles.)
He who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition, youth and age are equally a burden!
(HATTIE eyes him fiercely, a dagger of resentment. He shrugs and turns his attention to the stove, where he fusses with assorted utensils in preparation for breakfast. He lifts a frying pan and thoughtfully addresses it.)
Ah, beloved Pan!
(He sets it down and goes to the refrigerator for eggs and bacon. HATTIE angrily intervenes and closes the refrigerator door, placing herself between him and the groceries. He sighs.)
Poverty is the parent of meanness and discontent.
(From offstage comes the wail of an infant. HATTIE groans and exits limping to her baby. PLATO seizes this opportunity to get grub from the icebox.)
Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable!
(He opens an egg carton and sees there is only one left. He shrugs.)
It is better to have a little than nothing.
(He cracks the egg in the pan, turns on the flame beneath it, and takes several slices of bread from an open package. The child’s cry is heard again from offstage.)
Man alone … cast naked upon the naked earth, does she abandon to cries and lamentations!
(He stuffs a slice of bread in his mouth and puts two others in the toaster. HATTIE reenters with a swaddled bundle we presume to be her child. She sees PLATO helping himself and glares. He grins as if charmingly and swallows the mouthful of bread.)
Ahh! A great step toward independence is a good-natured stomach!
(She grabs the bag of bread he is holding and turns off the flame under the frying pan. She carries the baby to a nearby basket and lays it there to sleep. As she does, PLATO defends himself.)
Socrates says, “Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.”
(HATTIE stares the old windbag down in withering Alice Kramden fashion.)
HATTIE: Shut up!
(Awkward moment. PLATO gathers himself and makes a pettish observation.)
PLATO: What is the prime of life? May it not be defined in a woman’s life at about … twenty years?
(She could brain him for this, and picks up a rolling pin, but a coughing fit seizes her, and then, lumbering male noise is heard at the door. A key rattles in the lock, and the door opens, revealing GEORGE, HATTIE’s utterly soused lout of a husband. Lipstick kisses decorate his flushed face, and his clothes are wrinkled. He leaves the door open, and staggers in, giggling. HATTIE collars him angrily.)
PLATO (warily): An overtaxed patience gives way to fury!
(This is a personal problem, so PLATO turns away, to the kitchen counter. HATTIE shakes GEORGE furiously, but he just giggles helplessly.)
A fit of laughter which has been indulged to excess almost always produces a violent reaction.
(PLATO’s toast pops up. He removes, butters and eats it, all as the couple wrangle close at hand. They jostle him inadvertently, so he feels compelled to advise them again.)
Submit to the present evil, lest a greater one befall you!
(At this bromide, the supine character on the couch stirs, removes his newspaper covering, and sits up. It is LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, the seventeenth-century author of maxims, plummy and foppish, self-delighted, deliberate and sly, in a full peruke. He addresses PLATO as a lesser competitor.)
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: Nothing is given so profusely … as advice!
(He puckers his lips, as if to say “Touché!” HATTIE and GEORGE tumble over the couch as they fight. GEORGE is no longer laughing, but gasping for breath as HATTIE tries to strangle him. LA ROCHEFOUCAULD clucks his tongue.)
Philosophy triumphs
easily over past evils and future evils, but present evils triumph over it!
(HATTIE grabs a large kitchen knife and stalks GEORGE, who tries a new tack by weeping crocodile tears.)
GEORGE: Honey, I’m sorry! I’m sorry!
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: Hmph! Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.
(Amazingly, HATTIE is touched by GEORGE’s contrition. Panting and heaving, they embrace. Suddenly, however, she finds a long blond hair on his shoulder.)
PLATO: Even a single hair casts its shadow! (Pause. He cites his source.) Publilius Syrus.
(The fight resumes. HATTIE breaks a bottle over GEORGE’s head. He falls to his knees, but she leaps to his throat and begins to strangle him. He collapses, and she pauses.)
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: Jealousy feeds upon suspicion, and it turns into fury—or it ends as soon as it passes from suspicion to certainty.
(HATTIE straddles her fallen husband and ponders momentarily. Will her passion pass? Instead of recovering, though, she suddenly goes at him with renewed vehemence, violently pounding his head against the floor. Then, just as suddenly, she stops, seized with the realization of what she is doing. GEORGE lies ominously still. Fearfully, she puts her ear to his chest to listen for his heart.)
HATTIE: Oh my God!!
(LA ROCHEFOUCAULD huddles with PLATO for safety.)
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: Our repentance is not so much regret for the ill we have done as fear for the ill that may happen to us in consequence.
HATTIE: George!… (GEORGE briefly regains consciousness. After a tense pause, he speaks, slowly and with difficulty, in bursts.)
GEORGE: Who … are … those … guys?… (He dies.)
HATTIE: I thought they were friends of yours! (She collapses weeping on his body.)
PLATO (to console her): The soul of man is immortal and imperishable.
(This nugget of nobility clinches the title as far as he’s concerned, and he simpers defiantly at LA ROCHEFOUCAULD over HATTIE’s head. LA ROCHEFOUCAULD stares at his rival unimpressed.)
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.
(PLATO decides to overlook this feeble cut.)
PLATO: You are young, my son, and therefore, refrain a while from setting yourself up as a judge of the highest matters.
(This petty, mock-patient debate is broken up by HATTIE’s sudden, feverish, even hypnotic recovery. She bolts upright with feral urgency. For a moment she turns away from GEORGE’s corpse to figure out some logistics.)
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: Neither the sun nor death can be looked at constantly.
(HATTIE drags GEORGE’s body into the other room. As she disappears, WILLA CATHER pokes her head in through the open door. She wears a simple country dress and the tastefully worn expression of a classic pioneer novelist, but here she functions as a curious next-door neighbor, concerned about the commotion. She has flour-whitened hands, from the bread dough she has been kneading in her kitchen.)
(HATTIE returns, possessed and wild-eyed. WILLA, who is an earnest drag, looks to HATTIE for an explanation. Pause.)
HATTIE (finally): I killed him!! But I didn’t mean to!!
(She falls to her knees in mad, brief, presuicidal prayer. She is beyond chatting with boarders and neighbors now.
WILLA recovers from her surprise, and regards HATTIE with strong, patronizing grace, like an old-fashioned teacher.)
WILLA: Sometimes, a neighbor we have disliked … lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side … Another person, really … Uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
(HATTIE babbles incomprehensible prayers.)
The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.
(She nods to her sage cohorts, a tad piously.)
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD (tartly): Old people like to give good advice. It is solace for not being able to provide bad examples.
(WILLA is basically impervious to this remark, and anyway, HATTIE stands up suddenly and stumbles to the window. She has ceased even noticing her guests. She climbs onto the ledge desperately, and is seized with another coughing fit, one last reminder of earthly travail.)
HATTIE: I’m sorry!!
(From the street below, we hear excited voices, a crowd assembling. Spectators call up to her anxiously.)
VOICE OF GOETHE: Miss, don’t! Calmly wait the morrow’s hidden season!
VOICE OF WORDSWORTH: Look for the stars! The rainbow comes and goes, and lovely is the Rose!
VOICE OF ROBERT LEY: Strength Through Joy!
VOICE OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY: The world is a fine place and worth fighting for!
AN ANONYMOUS VOICE: Jump!
VOICE OF CARL SANDBURG: I am the people! The mob! The crowd! The mass! Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
AN ANONYMOUS VOICE: Jump!
(HATTIE, miserable and confused, turns in to seek advice from the trio inside. She looks to them beseechingly.)
PLATO (to his companions): Human beings live in a cave. They see only their shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the walls of the cave.
(WILLA and LA ROCHEFOUCAULD murmur and nod. Their complacence dismays HATTIE, and she begins to bawl like Lucille Ball. She turns back outward. The three visitors look at each other as if they’ve done all they can, and shrug.)
VOICE OF FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT: We have nothing to fear but fear itself!
(But it’s too late. HATTIE jumps. Screams and uproar from the street below cover the sound of her tragic landing.)
WILLA: There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
(A low siren is heard approaching in the distance. It makes PLATO uneasy. He goes to the radio and turns it on.)
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: We may give advice, but we do not inspire conduct.
(He opens the abandoned bread package, takes out a slice, butters and eats it. The radio produces incongruous dance music, so PLATO tunes it to another station. After a moment of static, he finds an interview show.)
VOICE OF FRANKLIN PIERCE ADAMS:
Go, little booke!
and let who will be clever!
Roll on! From yonder ivy-mantled tower
the moon and I could keep this up forever!
A VOICE FROM THE STREET:
Who saw her die?
I, said the Fly!
With my little eye!
I saw her die!
(The siren stops. LA ROCHEFOUCAULD munches on his bread. CHRIST appears in the window and grins in at the three assembled thinkers. PLATO reflexively turns off the radio. CHRIST speaks enthusiastically—almost singing, like Baby June Hovick—but rather jarringly, like a bad actor delivering the wrong line with great cheerful conviction.)
CHRIST:
I am His Majesty’s dog at Kew!
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are YOU???
(CHRIST grins, and the baby awakes and cries. Blackout.)
THE GIRL WHO DATED THE MOON
The Hopi Indians, or at least some people who live out that way, tell the story of a willful girl who took it into her head to date the moon. Despite the protests of her parents, she invited the celestial body to her family home. Needless to say, what she expected to be an overwhelming experience proved to be a disappointment.
First of all, the moon turned out to have no light of its own, a disillusioning fact that was all too evident when it finally did arrive, a mere dark rock with no glow at all, and hours late because in dislodging itself from its orbit it had altered the very basis of timekeeping and confused even itself. Secondly, it was nothing in size like its seeming equal, the sun, which is a million times larger than the earth. Frankly, the moon was scarcely the diameter of the United States. And, of course, at close quarters its mysterious and provocative imperfections were deep jagged canyons
and ridges.
After a few fitful attempts at conversation, the girl fell silent. Her infatuation had been instantly shattered, and indeed, she hated the moon. However, it was too late. The moon had fallen for her, hard, and her indifference after inviting it such a great distance teased and obsessed it. It is a mere rock, remember. The moon began to pursue the girl around the grounds, but she turned into a Coleman lantern to escape his notice. (It should be mentioned that she possessed the power to turn herself into anything at will, a talent she had so overly indulged as to lead to her disorientation. That probably explains how she became so addled as to ask the moon out in the first place.)
The moon eventually noticed that there was a Coleman lantern it hadn’t noticed before, so the girl quickly transformed herself into a hare, a broomstick, the shingles on the gardening shed, and even a set of second-mortgage papers, but the moon knew enough, if not to see through each successive disguise, to realize it was getting the runaround. Its love turned suddenly to hate; these things happen even in astronomical circles, and it swore it would kill her when she stopped transforming. At this point her parents asked it to leave, and as it ascended into the sky, it vowed it would never return, and it never has.
At hearing his vow, the girl turned back into herself and ran out onto the lawn to taunt the moon as it receded, an unnecessarily cruel fillip, but she was willful and that is what happened.
Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales Page 8