For Whom the Marquee Glows

My valuable time has been usurped this evening, filling out financial aid forms with Genius. Good thing that boy is smart, because I have a feeling he ain't gettin' nothin' 'cept what his noggin earns him in an academic scholarship.

Two-and-a-half hours I shall never recoup. Hours that I could have spent writing an interesting post. Or better yet, spent readying tales from the wood for submission to the Not Your Mother's Book series. I've got a bunch of them inside me, yearning to escape. The gas station chicken keeps shoving them back down.

Some of my more outgoing tales have already packed their bags, and departed to seek their fortunes in the world of entertainment. Others are waiting in the wings at the local dinner theater, biding their time until their cue. Some have just signed up for a thespian class at The Learning Annex. And a few sit in the audience, too timid to draw attention to themselves.

I wish them well, my little proteges. All big-eyed, breathless, and naive, sharing a cold-water flat with fifty-nine or so roommates, hoping not to be the one evicted for eating somebody's leftover Hunan Chicken in the communal icebox. That ragtag bunch of newbies, putting on a show, pleased as punch to be performing, still shocked to discover an audience on the other side of Aunt Penelope's old drapes.

How long before they're old and jaded? Sneaking out the stage door into the alley for a cigarette. Heating up the prop room in the throes of a clandestine affair with another ingenue or manchild. Refusing to sign autographs. Demanding a table without waiting at the dinner rush, bellowing, "Don't you know who I am?"

Then all too soon, they shall languish, spirit broken, having never hit Broadway, hacks in a rundown hotel where old has-beens go to reminisce about the salad days. When everyone was spit-shined and bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, glowing with the vitality of youth.

Youth. So frivolously wasted on the young.