Petesophizing...

The new working title of my play is THE NIGHT THEY INVENTED CHAMP EGAN, and I think it might stick. I'm putting the finishing touches on another draft.

The following exchange between characters has me reminiscing about an old friend -- and about taxis. "Champ" is an American and "Alexander" comes from the tiny Republic of Korvatz. (Can't find it on the map? I'll see if I can produce a link in another post.)

CHAMP

Did you get any psychiatric training in Korvatz?

ALEXANDER

I learned this as some teenager in the backseat of my brother's taxicab. Those Russian imports were maybe sixty, seventy percent cardboard but the back seat was "magnifico". If the girl was small she could lay down completely.

Those of you from my poker and chess days might recognize an echo of Alex R., my friend and onetime apartment mate (I was really more of a squatter), in that "magnifico". My fictional Alexander shares with Alex R. that kind of verbal play referencing a third language, even as he bruises his second language, English, a little.

It was, in fact, Alex R. who told me about the enormous ("cardboard") Russian taxicabs commonplace when he was a young man in the former Yugoslavia. They now bump and splash in the memories of an expatriot from Korvatz.

The real Alex R. has a wonderful story about those cabs, too, a story I haven't grifted for my play, but I probably should.

Back in the old country, after dinner one night, he and his date hailed a taxi. Alex being a gentleman escorted his female companion to one side of the car and closed the door for her. He got in on the other side. The evening had been going well and he felt there was plenty of chemistry between them. But they were now separated by the Continental Divide of that enormous back seat. An insurmountable distance.

Years later, having each gotten married, they ran into one another an ocean away in New York -- and joked about how, if that taxi had been smaller, their lives might have been quite different.