Changes, Part 1 (this one sold, but then the funding fell through)

Changes

Originally this was an “earplay” that was going to be produced by National Public Radio as part of a Twilight-Zone-like series.  I’ve modified the script format some for easier reading.

It has been said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  What about kindness?  What about truth?  What about reality?

Reality.  A stable word meant to imply immutability beyond question.  But what if that immutability depends on our believing it’s beyond question?

If reality could be shaped by our beliefs, would we want to know?  That could lead to…

CHANGES

Three hippies are smoking pot on the porch of a rundown California beach house.  An older, inebriated man stumbles around inside the house, visible through open glass doors.  Cars whiz by on a nearby highway.  Waves pound the beach.  Seagulls cry.

Ritchie, the only black on the porch, kicks a cheap transistor radio back into life:  “And in Memphis, Tennessee, James Earl Ray, charged with the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., met with his lawyer, Arthur J. Hanes of Birmingham, to chart his defense.  And now back to the Wolfman Jack show on this beautiful, balmy day of summer ’68…

Wolfman Jack howls, then continues in his throaty voice.  “Hey there, kiddies, let’s catch the Birds.”

The Birds start in singing “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man.”

Ritchie turns the radio off.  “Fay white boy don’t care none about Dr. King.”

Gary, a scrawny intellectual, chokes on the pot he just inhaled.  “Wolfman Jack’s white?”

Ritchie rolls his eyes.

The drunk inside the house knocks something particularly noisy over.

Ritchie:  “Hey, Mona!  You let that wino into my house again?”

Gary:  “Yeah!  Get him out of here!  He’s gonna bring me down!”

Mona:  “Aw, hang loose, you two.  You’re the ones putting out the bad vibes, not him.  Nobody let him in.  He just comes in like the tide.”

From inside the house comes the sound of someone opening the refrigerator.

Ritchie:  “The tide don’t go through mah refrigerator!”

Wino, from inside the house:  “Where’s the mayonnaise?”

Mona:  “Aw, come on.  Last night I bought enough groceries to feed every sunbather in sight.”

Gary:  “Man oh man, Calley-fornia!  Observe the stiffs stretched out on the beach.  Where else but L.A. can an entire population escape reality by broiling in their own beta waves all day?  It’s a wonder anyone can make a decent living peddling dope around here.”

Mona smirks.  “You’re too hard on them, Gary.  Someone moved down there, not 15 minutes ago.  Don’t be such a cerebral snob.  You’ll have a bad trip when the stuff that ‘poor, starving dope dealer’ sold you comes on.”

Gary snorts.  “He was a clothes horse!”

Mona sounds sincerely concerned.  “I don’t want to watch you freak out.”

Gary:  “You won’t have to, baby.  He ripped us off.”

Mona:  “What time is it?”

Gary:  “Three o’clock!  I dropped that…’super acid’…an hour ago.  You dropped yours, Mona, maybe 15 minutes later.  By now that bleached-out beach should be crawling with hallucinations.”

A bleached blonde with teased, bouffant hair bounds halfway up the stairs from the beach, smiling up at Gary.  “Ritchie?”  She’s holding a new record album and practically jumping for joy, gorgeous in a string bikini.  “You Ritchie?  I’m not a nark or anything.”  She giggles a lot at that.  “Donna next door said you have a boss stereo, and that you wouldn’t mind if I tried my new…”

Ritchie comes into view, leaning over the railing and smiling at the sight of her.  “I’m Ritchie.  Come on up.”

But she looks surprised at the sight of Ritchie.  “You’re Ritchie?  The guy who owns this house?”  Her face falls and she backs down the stairs.  “Never mind.  There must be some mistake.”

Ritchie:  “Come on up!  I’ve got a ‘boss’ stereo.  KLH speakers!”

But she’s running back down the beach.

Gary:  “Sorry, man.  Sometimes I’m ashamed of my own race.”

Ritchie, visibly hurt as he watches her go, mutters, “Sometimes?”  Then he juts his chin out, acting tough.  “You jivin’ me?  No loss, baby, no loss.  That wasn’t real blonde hair.  Bleached.  Ratted.”

The wino calls from inside the house, “Blondes will be the death of you, Ritchie!”

Mona puts a hand on Ritchie’s arm.  “All that bleach must have dripped into her eyes…damaged her vision.  Otherwise she couldn’t possibly have resisted your black-is-beautiful self!”

Gary sounds breathless as he stares out at the beach.  “Wow!”

Ritchie:  “Say what?”

Mona stares at Gary in shock.  “Stuff comes on hard!  Look at his eyes!”

Ritchie looks into Gary’s eyes.  “Umm, umm, ummm.  You gonna wish that clothes-horse dope dealer did rip you off!  What did you two take?”

Mona wrinkles her brow with concern.  “Acid.  We dropped some kind of acid.  Gary scored it right off the street.  Some slick hustler on the Strip.  Never saw him before.”

Ritchie:  “Yeah, yeah.  So many people peddling dope on Sunset Strip nobody knows them all.  What kind of acid?”

Mona shakes Gary.  “Gary, what did you take?  What did you say before?  ‘Super acid’?”

Gary, a wreck, struggles to concentrate.  “No…no…that’s not exactly what he said.  He said it was ‘better than acid.'”

Mona:  “‘Better‘ than acid?  I didn’t even want to take acid, but you didn’t want to trip alone and I…always…”  She trails off, hanging her head.  “And now it turns out you don’t even know what we took?”  Looking up, she grabs Ritchie.  “Look at the size of his pupils!”

Ritchie laughs.  “Any bigger and he’d be dead.”

Mona:  “That’s not funny.”

Ritchie leans toward Gary.  “Hey, man, what d’ya see out there?  Are you hallucinating?”

Gary sounds flat…distant.  “No.”

Mona and Ritchie exchange a look of disbelief.

Gary suddenly looks lucid, but still has trouble talking.  “What if…”

Mona:  “What if…?”

Gary:  “What if…  What if there really isn’t a beach out there?”

Ritchie looks relieved and turns away.  “He’s going ‘intellectual’ on us again.”

Gary:  “What if the only reason we see a beach out there is because we all think there’s a beach out there so we refuse to see…”

Ritchie:  “Say what?”

Mona:  “It’s not his fault.  His mother was a ‘beatnik’ intellectual.  He grew up in the West Village.  Cut his teeth on existentialism.”

Gary continues, oblivious of the others.  “…so we refuse to see all the other things that could be out there instead of a beach!”

To be continued next week…    

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