While other boomers are writing important stuff about life, love, marriage, and mental health, I'm goofing off.
You see, I have been working on my cicada opera. In fact, I'm getting really jazzed about it. I'm afraid I'm too late for the cicadas in the north and though we have them here every summer, the plague is not expected this year and cicadas are my gimmick. (As Gypsy Rose Lee says, "You gotta' have a gimmick if you wanna' get ahead) It's probably a wasted effort and this is a long post, but anyway, here's the synopsis.
The stars are two cicada lovers who have waited seventeen years to come into the world and begin their search for love. They sing soulfully about how in their spirits they know they have only one true love and they have a limited time to find them. All the cicadas know they will die in six weeks if they are not killed before then by the Little old Ladies of the Garden Club who swat, spray, and squash them or the older city Fathers who are frantically trying to rid the city of cicadas before the big game. The cicadas are eating the plants and driving everyone away from the ball park.
The lovers are tempted to settle for sex by the other cicadas who simply want to have one big orgy before they all die.
The eleven o'clock song is a bawdy little number in which the male lead cicada sings romantically downstage about how he longs only for the love of his life and has a short time to find her while the lead female cicada sings upstage, unseen by the male, about the same problem. The Ladies of the Garden Club and the Bothered city fathers sing about the terrible plague while a chorus of the more sex starved cicadas sing an off key tune about how they just want to have sex before they are all killed or die.
Finally the little old Ladies who have stayed outside after dark to fight off the cicadas and the city Fathers who have stayed up late to spray the cicadas with a complicated hose operation, get drawn into the beat of the sexy cicada songs and they all begin to dance with each other in a sexy number to include the hoses and the garden implements. Then the tone changes as they realize that they too have a limited time for love before they all die and choose love over sex.
The humans wind up bringing the lovers together and they sing a romantic love song, only to be separated by the bawdy cicadas who finally all die while the lovers are given an extended time by love only to die in each other's arms while being serenaded by the little old ladies and the city Fathers.
Anyone know any place for a crazy musical like that?? We don't even have cicadas here yet.
Just further proof that I have a very SICK mind.
smile