The Galley Set (2)

Act I Scene 1 notes

Mop and bucket first shot. Whose hands are on it? We do not know yet. We do not even know we are on a ship yet, do we? We will keep the galley help a mystery. For now, let’s just say the galley is getting mopped, we could at some seas, as much as we need to gain meaning, inexpensively. I have never mopped a galley; scrubbed a bloody deck a plenty, but I never worked on a boat for more than a day that had a galley, and then I was crew. I am too old now, unless it was my own research vessel. I could easily inject myself in as galley crew, hired by an owner that no one knew.

I do not think it right to disclose this yet. So, I won’t. I think back to 2020 Spyglass, on the left coast, dealing with the prednisone. I could hear what I was saying, and the looks the crew was giving me then, as covid kicked the crap out of the Alex Jones crowd that had drifted out of Bakersfield and Fresno to annoy the hell out of the Shell Beach well to do. Some of my tough bucks had spent months getting their asses covid kicked, so they were a bit weak when I was blithering on about noodle factories and research vessels. They, respectful of the elderly, had been forced to listen to me for a decade by then, which is like a century on the Central Coast of California, just feet off the One. The Doc anchored the operation, out of Brooklyn, half a century before I stepped in, or on, what had been going on since prohibition, now the Doc was dead, and I was in place to observe the transition of power, jacked up on prednisone.

Now it’s 2024, yet another election year. I have a screenplay to create, and I will do my best, yet another first in a long line of functions I have cluelessly performed, knowing nothing; akin to when I mixed a bottle of ammonia with quart of bleach in a mop bucket of hot water in the Rumson Hotel kitchen in 1972 at fifteen, on a Sunday between brunch and dinner service, working alone after the cooks had gone. What could go wrong? Nixon had just won again.