FOR COLORED GIRLS

Theater-envy, the other night, at the Beacon, baroque palace whose filigreed sunburst and pendulous omphalos focus attention through astrological channels back across which they may travel to planes of elevated awareness—hey, look! On the ceiling, two enormous nets bulging with balloons, and the airy realization: later, those are going to fall! On us! Amy and I got really high around the corner, we talk about productivity at the bar, applications we like, user-friendly web-design templates, and she: “How did we work before all this? At a snail’s pace?” I suppose—so how fast can we work? Fellow lab rats, we’ll soon find out. My paranoia boils down to one unanswerable question: Can everyone see what I’m thinking just by glancing at my face?

My second Tyler Perry production. A slice of life, in which a dance teacher is violently date-raped while her young student with big dreams becomes pregnant and is forced to get a back-alley abortion from alcoholic demon Macy Gray, because she was refused the money to do otherwise by slutty sister Thandie Newton who lives across the hall from a woman whose alcoholic, abusive war-vet husband not only dangles but drops their two small children from a fifth-story window onto the Harlem concrete below, an event witnessed by the wife’s boss, tough-as-nails magazine editor Janet Jackson, whose own partner is not only revealed to be on the down-low (“the pool-boy in the Hamptons, my driver, the guy at the opera the other night…”) but has now infected Janet with HIV. Can it have been lost on her, the echo of the image? For Michael, too, once got in a lot of trouble dandling a child from a high balcony. Her cat-mask the relic of those bygone vatic choreographies. We needn’t fear drama, or heed the voice in the back of the mind that whispers like a quivering child, asking, when oh when will those balloons be released at last? They come down bombs, or babies, or stars, or lotus blossoms. That lotus-strewn island no one can remember. The sirens go by in the street. I hope my wife waited up.