Fig. It. Out.
by Katharine Elizabeth Monahan Huntley
Graphic Design by Lily Rivera
Huzzah! Elephants Fall From the Sky Backdrop Hurrah!
The multi-media narrative contains behind-the-scenes mundane details of the action-packed thrill ride from epiphany to execution.
kTVision Presents; Artwork & Graphic Design of the Poster & Playbill; Original Music; Teaser & Film; Script & Stage Directions; Push Up The A Cups.
Amor Invincibilis!
by Emily Figueroa + Katie Royal + Maxwell Trautmann
Click on above image to meet the authors!
kTVision Presents
Elephants Fall From the Sky
On Stage: Podium on Stage Left
Lights on
Audience Lights Shut Off
ENTER: Andrew- center stage with mic
Emcee Andrew’s Introduction:
Elephants Fall From the Sky is a performance art pastiche of little deaths and vita transcendence. Stories told bold with Gravitas and Levity.
Don’t look for Veracity.
Check. Check. Check the Poetry. Read it then Shred it.
Katy (peeks through curtain): Yeah, I Said it.
Wallie (backstage): You Said wut?
Lili enters/ Lili Taps! (20-30 seconds)
CUE Music: Rebel Rebel (Song length TBD.)
Change light to pink
ENTER: KATY center stage with mic
Katy’s Spoken Word:
Title: The Boys Are Back in Town
“Hell no.” said Topcat, as she took a drag.
“Hell no to those in the know.” “Fuck.”
“Fine.” “Somebody pass me a mirror, cuz I ain’t got much time.” Where the Hell’s my Wine?”
Catty chimed, “We look better now than we did back then, and aren’t you curious?
“Isn’t that what I just said?”
Topcat lassoed the twins, Fran and Rick, along with Scott, Valvur, and Neuner. We fixed up in the Upper Room: The Ruthless, “addition.” Some would consider it an eyesore, a ramshackle shack detached from the rambling main house. These days had seen better days.
70s party paradise. Peter Jacuzzi lived down the road. Yes, that Jacuzzi. “You’re soaking in it.”
Flash in the past. Fifteen minutes of fame. Parade of charades. We didn’t care, we didn’t wear underwear.
At the High School Reunion, The Smoker’s Corner Crowd sparked up ciggies outside the banquet hall. Tennys Duffy walked our way. “I’ve always loved the way you smoke cigarettes. You make it look so Kool.” With a K.
Tennys never gave the time.
Neither did Charlie Vance. Nor Topher. Or the Oddone brothers. Had they not been so hot, the spelling of their surname . . . odd ones undone.
Devin, the original Kingsman, married Homecoming Queen. She’d just published a Top Ramen cookbook and popped out a couple of kiddles. Both 23 and harried.
Flirt alert!
Catty batted her Maybelline burnt match lined lashes (velvet black) and smacked her “Lips to Match Your Mood” lip balm. 2 kinds: “Are you a Virgin or a Slut?” “. . . Moisturizes and protects cheap, chapped or just plain overused lips.”
Topcat, the twins, Valvur, and Neuner jammed out for the Grand Slam. Reminiscing about their junior high Physics teacher, Mr. D., in a Denny’s back booth one Friday night lights out. Making out w/ a glam gal. No wife in sites.
Feeling British, Scott and Catty drove up to Orinda Downs on the wrong side of the road.
The “Julie Holbrook Let’s Just Be Friends” boys were throwing a kegger.
KATY EXITS
PINK LIGHT OFF/ STAGE LIGHTS ON
ENTER ANDREW
NOTE: LIGHTS FADE TO BLACK DURING POEM
Andrew’s Poem:
I heard a rumor today about you
Okay
They said you were wrong
Okay
You gotta stop acting like that
Okay
I know we’re friends but you don’t have much more
Okay
You walk funny
Okay
Let me teach you how to walk normal
Okay
You also wear your pants wrong
Let me show you
Okay
See now you look normal
Now we should practice what you say to people
Okay
When they ask you what you did this weekend don’t say “like” or
“duh”
Okay
So now I can feel good about defending you because before it was hard for me.
You don’t realize the pressure you put on me.
It’s like I’m the only friend you have that actually cares about you.
You don’t realize what I’m teaching you is to make the school like you.
It’s not as if I don’t like you.
I just find it hard to walk with you
Talk with you
Shop with you
Eat with you
Play with you
Skate with you
That one time I wanted to smoke with you, you said no like it
was bad for you.
Okay
LIGHTS BLACK OUT BY END OF POEM
SET STAGE: (45 seconds)
Title: MAC’S SCENE
Stage lights up
KATIE ENTERS- begins narration
Men exit with coffin as narrator says last line
LINE: “and made their way to Luz’s party” – LIGHTING BLACK OUT
Luz enters during blackout with beach chair and cooler midstage right
LIGHTS ON: Optional blue and pink light to set scene for party?
Scene continues
LINE: “not even him, but us, together” BOYS EXIT – Luz takes chair and cooler
Katie’s finishes narration
LINE: “It was Christmas in July” LIGHTS BLACKOUT
Dancers ENTER, Katie Exits to AUDIENCE
SIMULTANEOUS: CUE FAME/ LIGHTS ON
Transition to: FAME
Music: Fame (Song length TBD.)
Katy & Wallie’s Spoken Word:
Andrew: From the west to the east, these ladies are never the least . . .
Katy: Who are you calling a lady?
Andrew: Ad lib Title: Memoirs of a Matriarch: It’s All Fun Until You Break a Nail
Katy: Pivot turns and past burns, too-toos in full effect. Matriarchs on a mission, Christmas afoot, ripping and zipping through the aisles. This diva guided me, as I did her. Cooking up pork, handing me a fork. Serving up knowledge and strive. I took the dive. After New Year’s, she dressed me in gold and sent me on my way. Which way?
Up, of course.
Wallie: It was like . . . the theme music to the Wicked Witch of the West bicycling. Driving the jeep, raving, from store to store, buying up the Christmas chore. No time to settle the score.
Waking up from sleep. Shhh . . . Don’t make a peep.
She’s the Veep. It was like falling into the deep. Being touched by Meryl Streep.
Sins on your soul will seep. What you sow is what you’ll reap. And we weep.
Bleep. Or, we write memoirs. We are matriarchs of course.
Title: How a Trans Girl and Divorcée Came to Slay
Fox and I walked from The Federal to “The Social,” an apartment complex located within North Hollywood’s NoHo Arts’ District “Pizza Slice”—the triangle of Vineland, Lankershim, and Camarillo. Fast cars drag race late nites over the hill to Hollywood–flashing by the red neon signs of Johnny’s Auto Body and the Colony Inn, rife with sin. It bills itself to tourists as the “Hotel Near Universal Studios.” To get to Little Toni’s from Idle Hour you jaywalk.
The Social’s Penthouse #6 is a study of geometry in motion. Rooftop parties jammed with revolving roomies ranging from Jr. High mates to ill-fated spoilt baby rock stars. Balconies occupied by tween actors and Tik Tokers are in hip-hop distance of each other.
Levi Ponce’s mural, Baby Buddha, Bob Marley, and Jimi is painted on the backside of Big Boss Records studio. They keep a watchful eye over Huston Street, the strip that perpendiculates Mr. Patel’s no tell motel from Ponce’s “Soliloquy,” protector of the wholesome, homeless, hoes, anything goes.
The elevator sighs, “Fourth Floor,” and opens up to the front door where Wallie and I live and go live with our podcast, “At The Four Twelve: Cocktails and Conversation with the Heyy and Divorcée.” Wallie had originally roomed with my eldest son, MacGuinness, one story up at the PH6. At times, various “Socialites” take part in the revolving apartment art installation. My younger son, Killian—Gaelic for “strife,”—has occupied three. Wallie’s trans mother, Raquel Starr, resides in the #409. We are a biological and logical family. Progressive. Nonaggressive.
Music: Playground Love (Song length TBD.)
Excerpt from The Virgin Suicides
Lillye Hope (6:00)/Lili Hardy (8:00) “We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt so compelled to compliment each other . . . We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors were together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like elephants with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”
Wallie’s Interview:
Music: I’m Every Woman (Song length TBD.)
Andrew: Wallie was tragically born a male and is sheroically transforming to female. Named after a cousin who was killed in a woodchipper, her father, Jose David Cruz, promised his sister, Mori—Hebrew for “bitterness of Yahweh,” —that he would name his first-born child after the original. Fargo, right?
Wallie: “As a child growing up in Philly, I knew I was different. I liked certain things that other boys didn’t. ‘Why do you like girl music?’ ‘Why do you dance like a girl?’ I always felt like a girl. As I got older, the mirror was telling a different story. You assimilate, especially when you are in terror of your parents finding out. You do not want to be your parents’ disappointment.
Andrew: She found willing support from her Kindergarten teacher, Miss Campbell.
Wallie: “Playing dress-up; feeling pretty. I was frolicking in an 80s cocktail frock that puffed out. It had a cinched waist six sizes too big for me, and when I spun around, it opened up into a complete circle. I fought with the girls over the black and white garment. I told my teacher, ‘Miss Campbell, I love what you’re doing, but we need, like a wig or a clip in ponytail.’ She brought in a pink bag from the beauty supply store. In it was a little bob brown wig but I wanted the flirty pony. Now I had two things to fight over. A teacher’s assistant snapped a picture of me, and I begged her not to show my mother.”
Andrew: They kept her secret. In 1st grade, however, Wallie told her mother, from the shower, that she wore dresses. Wallie’s mother asked . . .
Wallie: “What else have you done?”
Music: (Song length TBD.)
Title: Run to You
Wallie: “In the fall after high school, mom bought me a $1000 dollar hoop dee car with a push start button that would always fall out. I started cosmetology school. Kits, mannequins . . . I excelled as I had been doing hair since I was eight years old.
Andrew: After graduating Florida’s Aveda Beauty College, Wallie moved to L.A. with Jason, a recording artist boyfriend with a contract. Still . . . evictions, surfing from couch to couch—homeless for two months. Wallie was hired at an upscale shoe shop, took a second job at Forever 21, and was doing hair on the side. ALDO shoes and accessories is where Wallie met me. One of my roommates would come to lunch, and Wallie wondered . . .
Wallie: ‘Who’s this little white boy with swag?’
Andrew: The “little white boy with swag” was MacGuinness.
Wallie and Jason’s relationship was shot, and during a fight, Jason called the police. Wearing boyfriend jeans and a pink sweater that said, “Hooked on You,” Wallie grabbed her new six-inch platform boots and ran out of the house.
Wallie: “I didn’t even grab my toothbrush. I called Andrew, who told me to . . .
Andrew & Wallie: Just go to the PH6.
Katy: A year later, Wallie was standing at attention in military lineup fashion with the other Socialites, when I walked through the front door of the PH6, a toothbrush in hand and both sons at my back.
Cheetah Girls Cinderella Song
Wallie: “Looking at Disney, I would see myself as the girl, Chuchi, from the Cheetah Girls. It was a rude ass awakening to me that I wasn’t. Looking in the mirror, I didn’t see what I saw in my head as a twenty-three-year-old. I was just listening to music, getting older, and having to do the best with what I had. There was always something happening with my hair, every version preppy, edgy, long hair, short. I was never satisfied. Up until I started meeting other trans people and seeing how beautiful they are . . .”
(Raquel’s Burlesque Moment)
“I heard about Raquel Starr from another girl, Jesse. She said, “I have a girlfriend who lives in this building; she actually lives right down the breezeway from you. Jesse said she was this and she was that—all that. I’m not the kind of gal impressed by the hearsay. Let me see, let me meet her, you know, that kind of thing?”
Andrew: Wallie finally met Raquel at her birthday held at Cobra.
Wallie: “She’s in a skintight dress made from pink snakeskin leather. I walk up to her, ‘So, we live in the same building.’ I realized I had seen Raquel in passing at Evita, way back with Bradshaw. Long ginger hair with a gold chain link dress. Glistening, floating through the room. She stumbled upon our bottle service, offering party favors and taking shots of tequila. She wanted me to do the wig for her Viper Room performance. The wig was terrible. I made it not terrible.
And just like that, Jessica Rabbit became my drag mother, and I, her drag daughter.”
Andrew: Incrementally, the inevitable millennial guyliner led to an enviable mug of glamour; tucks and Spanx under slips.
Raquel comes in and sits at the vanity.
Wallie: “I was visiting family in Florida. had just come back from shopping, and since it was the weekend, I already knew Grandma and Grandpa were sipping whiskey and milk. I rushed to their suite, where they offered me a drink. Grandma pulled me aside, ‘I’ve got something for you that helped me, and it will help you.’
Goes to the second drawer of her dresser and takes out a zebra print lace push up bra and told me to put it on, so I did. Pushed up the A cup girls. Grandma said, ‘There. Now it looks like we have something.’
I felt like a little kid, foreign. I pushed them up, and as I sat and drank with her, she would make comments like, ‘It needs to be a little tighter.’ And as much as I tried to pull on my fat from back through my armpits, it wasn’t going to happen.”
Raquel: Once I got my body, it was the end for all the other bitches.
Wallie: “I decided to delay my return to NoHo, and take the necessary steps to slay. My mother, Hurricane Jacqueline, went with me to Miami. She took care of me while I recovered from my boob job along with a few other sumpin’ sumpins’.”
Andrew: So Wallie, how can allies support?
Wallie: Become informed. Get educated. Realize the evolution. Complacent cis girls always feel the need to comment, and make it seem so unobtainable. You were born a girl, use it to your advantage. I couldn’t play with my mother’s makeup. You had the time. You also act like it fucking happens like magic—the drive and wanting to do something. . . . putting your best face on and handling. The more passable you look, the safer you are in society. It can be death for those that can’t get surgery. . . . And, why the intimidation, why the reluctance to accept trans sisters?
(And why isn’t my bang working?)
Cis women shouldn’t feel competition; they know what they got. When Audrina goes out with her cis and/or gay friends, and a straight guy is paying attention, it’s always the jealous friend, girl or gay, that feels compelled to point out she is trans, which can lead to a dangerous situation.”
Andrew: “How do you feel when you look at cis girls?”
Wallie: “I look at them with pity. I just feel I need new friends. Friends that make me sweat. Why should you be in sweats while I’m in heels?”
Music: (Song length TBD.)
Title: Baby, I’m a Starr
Raquel Starr’s Interview
(Narrator to be determined) “Barbara Walters: You don’t have to look like this. You’re very beautiful. You don’t have to wear the blonde wigs. You don’t have to wear the extreme clothes, right?
Dolly: No. It’s a . . . It’s certainly a choice.”—Dolly Parton: Here I Am
2:33-2:51
Katy: Story told gold. She don’t care if it’s pretty shifty, or gritty. The urgency . . . the agency. Authentic expression overtakes the fake.
L.A. long drives, long cons, what could possibly go wrong?
Toys boys blank blondes vacuous vapid stares parents unaware, no care.
Starry eyes. Lies between thighs.
What’s a girl to do? Go ask Alice or become Jessica Rabbit?
Raquel: There was an ugly fight with my father. Because I have a sister, because I wanted to discover myself, I ran away. I left Monterey, Mexico, just shy of eighteen for McCallum, Texas.
Running lost into the wild, and, honey, I find the wild.
I worked in a mall candy shop. All I knew was music. Always singing in Spanish. A friend heard me sing and invited me to a casting for a band to perform at quinceañeras.
Identifying as gay, I met an amazing transgender woman, who invited me to perform in drag shows. Give me a microphone!
Katy: What did you sing?
Raquel: “Bésame Mucho.”
Katy: Reaction to the action?
Raquel: Compliments, “You’re so pretty, you’re so pretty . . . Coming from . . . not a broken home, but a home that definitely had troubles, and at the time the trouble was me. I thought I had to fix myself.
Katy: I see . . . you turned to the audience for acceptance. Go on.
I received an amazing amount of love from all these people. Not to mention the tips!
I started performing in different venues; after the restaurants closed, I’d play at the gay bars. Out of the blue a club from Houston hit me up.
I didn’t know anything about make-up.
I didn’t know anything about padding.
I didn’t know anything about wearing a bra.
Yet, once I started, I just didn’t want to take off the drag. It became my second skin!
Fuck it. Time to move to Hollywood.
I just turned 21. I had enough money to stay in a West Hollywood hotel for a week. . . . when you take off your clothes, make the night count to make the day survive.
I did the show, and people liked me. A friend in the exotic adult film industry introduced me to a producer. He liked me for who I was and wanted to move fast. I wanted to move slow. I moved in with him after a week.
I had my boobs done as a rite of passage, then went back home to Texas to recover. Family judgement faded away. My father said, “Human beings are not meant to travel alone in the world. You have a family, and I’m sorry I didn’t see the beauty in you. I see you.” And for the first time, I felt seen.
I became a Mother to Nikita Dragun, and now Wallie. I have love for the upcoming generation and wish to share my stories so they may avoid the same struggles I faced.
(ALL CAST AND CREW SILENTLY COME ON STAGE TO STAND BEHIND RAQUEL.)
Once upon a time, me being a little boy, daydreaming about becoming a star . . . I didn’t have a path; I didn’t have a plan. Opportunities came my way, and I evolved.
. . . And . . . I’m here.”
And (hands up), I’m here!
Twinkle fingers down.
Lili Taps!
Music: Heroes (Song length TBD.)
Bows & Acknowledgments!