(Monologue)

A man in a black suit stands beside a tall barstool at centre stage.  There are three yellow spotlights and the man stands under the middle one.  He has a glass of wine.  There is a piano behind him.

Soft music is heard but no one is playing the piano.

I died in France.

Of course that wasn’t my goal.  It just happened that way.  People, most people, don’t choose the location of their demise.  They end up in hospitals or along the side of a dark highway.  They find their terminal scene set in a mineshaft or an over loaded ferryboat in the Philippines.  I doubt these are places that people have chosen or intentionally selected.  I’ve heard that most people die in their own beds.  That sounds nice.  Well, nicer than the bottom of a canyon or the sidewalk next to a high-rise apartment.  I died in Paris, the City of Lights, and as luck would have it I died in a cemetery although I am not buried in that cemetery.

Unfortunately my mortal husk was shipped back to Canada where it belongs, at a great expense to my poor family.  My sister picked up the casket and paid the three thousand five hundred euro cost of the transportation.  I am okay with that.  You see, I partially blame her for my fate; an early death and an unhappy life spent vainly searching for something I could never find.  You may think I sound bitter.  I am okay with that, too.

I say that I only partially blame my older sister for my death because dying is always, sometimes just a little but always partially one’s own fault.  We don’t take care of our bodies.  We don’t make the right choices in life.  The wrong turn down the wrong road.  How you live is your own responsibility; therefore, so is how you die.

Yes, I blame my sister and her blue blanket.  Let me explain.

Lights change to a pale blue.  The man sits on the stool and sips the wine.

The music continues.

My sister Catherine is three years my senior.  We shared our childhood happily in a Toronto suburb and spent our time either avoiding our private elementary school or avoiding our parents.  We were inseparable.  We stuck together during swimming lessons, ice-skating, summer camps and the like.  Oh… and of course, piano lessons.  She excelled at piano.  I, however, did not.

Music abruptly stops. He looks at the half empty wine glass, sighs and clears his throat.

Music starts again.

I credit my loving sister for attempting to motivate me to achieve greatness in any field, of any sort.  This I did not do.  I can’t give excuses for my disappointing performance in my young life.  But I will place blame.  Intentional or not, Catherine sabotaged my every effort to succeed.  She was the darling of all the adults in our life.  Our parents on their dinner party and cocktail swilling circuit invariably filled the mingling and conversation with talk of Catherine’s recent achievements: first prize at a dance recital, top grades at the stuffy private school and future scholarships to unbelievably expensive universities.  To put it simply, my given place was in her shadow.  My birthright was to follow her never-ending examples of success.

He sips wine and takes a deep breath.  And angry look comes across his face.  The R and L side lights change to red.  The centre light remains blue.  The music gets a little louder.

Enter the blue blanket.  The scene is my seventh birthday.  Mother and Father have left for the evening, leaving me in the care of my ten-year-old sister.  My birthday present is a Philipe Entremont recording of Claude Debussy’s “Children’s Corner”.  This is my present but I know that they mean it for Catherine.  She was to begin her eighth-grade piano class the following Sunday and her new, terribly expensive teacher had been famous for ‘pulling the Debussy out of his young charges’.  I am seven years old.  I don’t know Debussy from orange juice.  Why?  Why, Mother?  Don’t I deserve a birthday present?  Something for me?

The music gets louder.

He wipes tears from his face and finishes the wine in one sip.

Catherine took me into the music room and put the big black 78′ on the record player.  She told me to get under the coffee table.  “This is the only way listen to Debussy” she said.  Catherine pulled a large blue blanket over the coffee table and placed the needle on the record.  I was in a world of blue.  I forgot about birthdays and parents, competitions and judgments.  Debussy’s music filled my brain with new thoughts and new feelings.  I saw landscapes of far-off countries.  I smelled flowers of unknown gardens.  I was transported away from me…And us.  That was my introduction to my imagination.  That experience introduced me to myself.  I was irrevocably changed.  Not for the better.

He stands and puts the empty glass on the stool.

The R and L sidelights go back to yellow.  The music softens.

The rest of my childhood was spent withdrawn.  No psychologist could figure me out.  No sister could motivate me.  No music could inspire me.  Except, of course Debussy.  In my teenage years I wandered around Canada and America searching for some other way into that blue world of Debussy and imagination.  I needed to return to my Self.  But I never found that door; neither in any bottle nor any pill.  Not in women, not thrills.  I had but one course of action left.  To France I fled, with the hope of rekindling the magical senses that had been inert and diffused since my experience under the coffee table in the music room, under the blue blanket.  I continued my debauchery and brooding in Paris.  I had no results or epiphanies.

The music gets quiet.  The sidelights fade out, leaving him under a blue spotlight.

One winter evening, after spending my last franc on a bottle of shiraz, I found the Cemetaire De Passy.  I wandered and sobbed and drank until I collapsed in a heap of regret and dry leaves.  Shivering and bleary-eyed I collected some leaves and the previous night’s snow and made a pillow.  The gravestone that I uncovered was, of course, that of Claude Debussy, 1862-1918.  I had found the door.

Thus, I died in Paris.  I blame myself.  And I blame my wonderful sister, Catherine.

The light fades out and the music continues for 20 seconds in the dark.

THE END

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