Let's Put On A Show!
I was lunching at Café d'Alsace. It came time to pay the bill. I motioned to the waiter, with that little handwriting-in-the-air thing that I learned about twenty years ago. And I wondered, as I did so, how dumb did I look? Here I am waving my arm in a gesture that perhaps I don't have down very well. Just this once, anyway, it seemed awkward, awkward enough to make me feel self-conscious.
The idea for the show burst open like a broken piñata.
Two shows, actually. In the first, a group of waiters, nominally getting together after their shifts, lampoon the great and the good of Manhattan upon whom they've been waiting all day. In terms that would be hilarious (comprehensible) to out-of-towners. This show, like A Chorus Line, would have its moving moments, and it would run for fifteen years.
The other show would the same, except that it would be written for the delectation of the great and the good themselves. A show that it would require some working knowledge of Manhattan to enjoy. (There really are two audiences in New York. Just wait for the tourist joke in the "Schadenfreude" number in Avenue Q.) This show would be presented at an annual festival, with fifteen or twenty performances, and it would change every year, like Forbidden Broadway. It would run in September, after the rentrée.
I'm putting this out in the teeth of a reasonable expectation that twenty people will tell me that Oh, Waiter! (a working title) has been attempted a million times and never even reached the Long Wharf. The only credit that I can take for the idea is in identifying myself as a potential member of the audience. Again like Chorus Line, the show would be "written" by real waiters. There would be auditions - oh, the irony of that. Auditioning actors who are waiting tables for the time being - qua waiters!
Well, waiters off duty. In other words: actors.
