Community Service Project

The Principle of the Littlest Window

Resolved: That somewhere, if there is a printer, a stock of paper tickets, a real or fake food item or display, a register of some sort, and/or any form of glass window or counter, a customer will wait there for service. Service, no longer patience, is a virtue. If you build it, the wrong ones come........

Situation: A small stand, with the above mentioned features, is set up in the middle of a fierce wilderness- dark and scary- with lions, spruce trees, snakes, ant-eaters, and Frogs, sleet, a full line of customers before it is your turn.......all not intimidating enough for Yuppie's to be served exactly as they wish. Go to the most isolated, abadoned section of any building or outdoor facility and wait. Where there is a little window and service, there is a way. For they will appear, and their constructive criticisms will be AWESOME.

Who waits at the window: That customer will be either a stupid, ignorant pre-teen, a 40-60 year old Yuppy overly concerned with themselves and CONTROL of everyone around them, or an elderly person, whose rabid desire for service, decades of Control seeking, have pushed them to the brink of mass societal destruction. Clearly granny is unhappy with the way things have turned out and she has an oozy to prove it. Late for the movies? 1940's-era Bazooka to the face! An unreasonably fast moving line of younsters, with exact change? Lock step parades and Grenades, like the old days! No Casablanca, and not at 8:00 AM, a time you found in the old paper kept from the Depression? Shooting stars of Denture Death.

Senior prices? honor for aged crack prostitutes? OR ELSE! The only fear for these elderly is of computers, technology, and their traditional robot menace.

Why Service is important!:

1. Hopes and Dreams: Customers will find this window and pin their hopes and dreams on the exquisite service of the Phantom of the Window.

The Phantom- half robot (in his perfection of service) and half human (in his witty banter with a clearly isolated, lonely, and unhappy customer/spontaneuous friend of yours.) provides everything needed by the mass of customers.

-"Are you open"- The customer does not intend to put a question mark here, because if they can, they will force you into their service. Serve or die.

While the customer asks you these questions, when you are probably busy counting money or something like talking on the phone, you should promptly tell them that you are open with all aspects of your life.

I believe it is ok to tell them of your bowel movements, or something, to show the stupidity of their question. Pre-teens will giggle, yuppies will show disgust, but deep down you will hit a nerve because their Yuppy bodies are decaying beyond their control-freak minds, their children are smoking pot and having lots of bestial sex, and the old ones will offer tricks and pointers that are both beyond your wildest imagination and your sickest fantasies. Service is initiated by the employee, so they need not be so demanding.

-"What movies are playing, and at what times?" Violence, which is what any sane person would desire over this question, is not an option. So your best bet is to humiliate our remedial friends.

Based on previous experience, your best bet is to point out every single movie time and movie title, looking up with our tarded friend to the overly large and obviously placed red neon sign, pointing at each and every single number, with all information they could ever want, with your own distorted brief and improvised description of the movie.

2. Just the Right Size and Weight: All of the customers' life desires will be bottled up into your ability to serve popcorn with exactly one drop of butter. This will prove to the customer that in the Window, their ideal weight and body figure will shine through your superb popcorn serving techniques. Diet Coke and a large, extra buttered popcorn with extra sodium, disguised as orange cheese salt....what better way for the customer to initiate a joke about their dieting failures?

4. The "Enjoy the Show, U2's "- Obviously you are wearing some sort of uniform to denote your employment at the establishment of which the customer is commenting. Its a safe bet that you "get to see the movies" and that at the moment of popcorn service, you will not be able to "also enjoy the show" as the customer has incorreclty and unhumorously indicated. Chuckles only indicate your participation with Communists and their en-masse, false sense of humor.

The Tale of Ellian Godzilles

Since we have clearly corrected the overly-service oriented attitudes of the public, it is important to pull up the less fortunate by their bootstraps, wooden shoes, and panchos. Once upon a time a little boy asked for a corrective hearing device to help him watch a movie. He had a family, he had a name...... We, being the most customer service oriented, responded with immigratory vigor. Here is where the tragedy only begins to manifest......

Being an intelligent, probably poor, foriegn boy, he had no ability to acquire our American custom of I.Ds. We (two boys and a girl) needed collateral at box office to provide him, a paying customer that probably snuck in, with the neccessary corrective hearing device. The deaf, in one ear, even hispanic ones, need I.D.'s like anyone else.

So our young hispanic friend, whose name we found to be Ellian on his American birth certicate, was immediatley sold into our custody for not having a Green Card. His friends did the selling; Ricky Martini and Pablo Escortbar, who left the poor chap, to engage in normal 12 year old stuff; drug deals and She-Banging. Ellian would build a home at Box Office B (uilder) for himself with our inventory, our hands, our country, and his toil.

We gave him the space behind the wall, poorly designed for counting money. We had but one goal for him........ To wash our hands after handling the dirty foreign money.

His Employment: We would stick our hands over the top of the uselessly placed, six foot tall green and black counting wall, and our friend Ellian would rush to meet our hands from the other side, like a scampering elf with a pot of gold at the end of our dirty finger-rainbows, of course in various sizes and types, but being stranded on a raft allowed our Latino friend to use his special ability- him, being deaf in one ear and all- to discern the difference in people's hands and attain a level of palm reading unheard of in most box office prisons in the Northeast.

After dealing with dirty money, we box officers needed to ensure our continued saftey, health, and level of fun and enjoyment, and the only way to do that was to hire/enslave someone to clean our hands for us, with the windex bottle we had provided him. We needed to maintain some level of leisure and dignity above the rest of the rabel folk. We were officers of the Great Wall, we intended to milk every service possible, and show them Who's The Boss.

We inventoried all the belongings so that we could assure our rather weak minded Concession-giving members that Ellian would not steal any of our precious cargo. We needed to be strong, for concessions would not be given here. He was staying no matter what!

His Leisure: Since we sought to strictly control every aspect of his life, we have decided that young Ellian should take up metal work. We decided to put a forge in the back wall, provide fire protection with an extinguisher and alarm, insulation to cover him up with when the heat remained off, and leave the actual metal techniques up to him. He was burned a few times, and had to remove his own eye after it had been gilded over with the metal he had been using to make us some jewelry. We need to look fine! The Golden Eye now sits on my mantle of conquest.

We box officers decided that Ellian should produce large impressionistic metal statues, in weird shapes. His first and worst attempts at metal sculptures were worthless, and he wasted a year of our time and patriotic spirit perfecting his techniques and wasting our metal girters and steal plates from the ceiling.

His best works gave us food for thought and as such we displayed them with pride for a day, and then disposed of them or sold what we could: a very metal boy behind a wall of steel bars, a raft with a boy and shark eating a dog?, another boy shaking bon bon ice cream nuggets in his hand, a boy crying, a tall cylindrical tube with smoke coming out of it with a bulb at the bottom ..... We could never quite figure out what message he was trying to get across, but its impressionistic art so go figure.

For some reason we never offered the boy the option to return the headphones, and leave, assuming of course that he not only had missed his movie, twenty years ago, but that he could not hear at all and most importantly he would want to stay and make sure we were as comfortable as possible at box office. Service with an Exile!

His culture: Shredded paper, an empty cigarette packet (to remind him of the Cuban cigars) in a large cardboard box- We considered it an ample house warming/Immigratory gift. We provided him with a postcard of the Titanic sinking, that provided both a moving symbolism of our theater competition, and an invigorating depiction of his family's fortune on the raft. Needless to say that he cried (in joy) when we told him that his parents sunk in icey water out of sight from Leonardo DiCaprio's very much grieved death. But they WERE in the same part of the ocean. His family photo hung on the business side of his wall, near the two sliver-ridden pieces of lumber he uses for his hammock.

He didnt laugh or appreciate our photo, even after we wrote out, in English and Dutch, the dual meaning of the picture, but we think its because he couldnt hear us. He has no other important cultural aspects, no sorry.

His Pet: The Flies that occasionally enter box office are not his pets. Those, Ellian quickly gobbles up, because last time I checked, nobody was feeding him.

In a half joking, half serious way, two female box officers produced a small paper figure, cut out the several seperate body parts of the deformed cartoon humanoid, and taped it on the back wall next to his Loveboat picture. In the middle we placed what we told Ellian was his sole Godzilles family heirloom; a bright pink heart. I think the girls probably got it from one of the many cheap vending machines around.

We often heard Ellian talk to his pet, 1 Gordy, and their conversations were in weird tongues. He said things like "revolution-airesdagenfritters." "Wa Wa" "I miss my (cha chas?)" "I'm hungry" "I'm not deaf" "uprising-frogenditzengers" We knew enough of the Dutch language to be slightly fearful of his rantings, but we didnt wanna go behind the wall and carve out 1 Gordy, for fear that our hands would be dirtied.

Soon Ellian and 1 Gordy became masters of metalurgy, interpretive art, and revolutionary philosophy, and frankly, we felt a little put off by the little bugger's recent advances. Eventually when he grew a beard and was asking for "benefits," we had to put the little guy down. We never saw Ricky Martini nor Pablo again, so Ellian needed to be dealt with properly when he passed. In his cold dying hands, he clung to 1 Gordy's pendant. In his last breaths, we told him that his parents were happy and living in Milwaukee, along with Ricky and Pablo, and that he was an American citizen all along. I think he was thanking us.

Each of us were clearly moved. We gave him a Viking Burial, in his home country's custom, covered in ritual coconut oils, with the finest cardboard and popcorn bag hats and gloves we could make. He was "popped" on a coardboard raft that we set afire in the parking lot. Maybe he made it home, to Dutchland, just maybe.....................

Free Ellian Godzilles!

Relief

I Need to Get This Out:

A Poem:

Bianca, Please! Let The Eye Count the Ways?

By Dr. Chester M. Hip Hop, AKA Bill Shakes-a-lotta-Booty-Brittney Spears.

From forth! the loins of a Virgin(?)ian and a Koopa Dragon!

A child of African-American descent him fathered

For he also! mounted poor Anthony's cousin, er..... Bianca's band-wagon

Poor parenting was her previous, oy blackest lover of men, bothered.

......................................................................................................................

Love? Maybe goes a long way towards the younger,

As schoolgirls invited to their party of rollerskates,

Such middle schoolers metamorphose into older, yet stronger

Yet willing! Bianca, only the Slicker now masticates!

......................................................................................................................

AH!-lbino! Bianca's totally white hair,

Her eyes of a solid Rogue-ish, parent-defying, red

Her seven foot tall body, savoir faire?!?!?!

Her agelessness?, my tallest anti-dwarf, laid to the biggest bed.

......................................................................................................................

For So long as The Eye hath watcheth carefully

So will the The Harassment be wrougthen continually!.

......................................................................................................................

Here are my notes from Work/Play: (Quotes are LITERAL reprints from the most enticing piece of advertising in Charity history!)

"A Night of Relief: Tsunami Relief Benefit"

My invitation read "The Day after Christmas, disaster struck in South Asia. But like many catastrophes, many around the world thought "what if?" those who have live in the ravaged areas thought "What now?" Come and help make a different in the lives of the thousands who have suffered from this tragedy. So many need your help......... "

What if? Wow. I pondered.....what if?.....what if this section was spell checked before being sent to the publisher, what if I trusted my dollars to these young entrepenuers, what if the rave wasn't the propa way to raise money for a disasta, or if the keg wasnt tapped by 430 AM......ignore the Tsunami......um spin tables out of Fiddy Cent!!!AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

"what now?... Join us for a Night of Relief!"

The victims?, The Horror?....

The Rave is the only fix for this DisastA!

Wow I thought. This is my shot, my one chance, I had to do something REAL for my pathetic life. Popularity, Women, Creativity, Music, History, Body Surfing, Thinking, verifiable charities......Not worth it....... So I put on my golashes (plastic boots.... left overs from old people) and Star Treked out in the snow with my personal invitation, furry hood, hat, heavy gloves, lightsaber, and Barbie First Aid kit. I wanted to make the entire journey to South Asia Myself. I wanted to save lives!This was my time to shine, my independence, and my time to aid. My snow shoes and parentially crocheted sweaters were a trivial matter, if I was going to party.

I needed to see exactly how I could help. How could I lose Myself in Tsunami Aid? What or Who was this "Choonz"? Is he prejudicial against natural ganstas, like me??? What sort of music is "tribal progressivism"? Would my fellow man drop their dollars like they're hot? Boy Was I in for the Night of my Life.

Choonz: The Final frontier?

First I decided that to help the victims I should go to:

"Room1: Relief (Ages 21+)"

This room must be only for the most dedicated donatas/legal drinkas. I was in for some true excitement as my adventure started off. I quickly found that "no strangers to our area these DJ's will be layin it down propa on the House tip." I pondered what a DJ was, were they aid fighter pilots?...........Or would I really get to meet the DJs, the REAL presidents of REAL South Asian Republics, Chad Roy of um Indo-Albany or sumtin and Depth of Viet-Syracuse???? These organizers are SO generous.

I entered the palace/warehouse and found that my invitation was correct in saying "these two will mix it up from downtempo to deep and funky and even a lil taste of some hip hop. (President) Chad and (Prime Minister) Depth will have the room groovin w/ their extended set" and boy were they, as they left their Head-of-State Turntables to go propa-diplomatic on a few female show artists.

I was now a true believer, as these two spinned their electronic devices.... the speakers hurt my sensative ears with their fly jams...... and danced with the scantlely clad female show artists in the palace. By hiring and then bumping and grinding with these girls, they were saving another generation from empowering women, un-employment, and servitude in the wake of disaster. The electronic drums drums added the tribal effect. Well Done Mr. President and Prime Minister!

I had never seen such wonderous neon lights before. Or the strobing pounding feeling dat da beat brought to ma body...... It reminded me of the time that the lights were turned on, for the first time at the age of 12, in my basement cage and I saw my parents cane me with bambo for the first time....the memories.

I walked up to the bar for some refreshment. The gentleman of the bar seemed nice and I sat to order a drink. After two hours of staring into space at the rave, I felt it was time to pull off my heavily furred hood. I ordered whatever choonz was, only to get asked:

"May I see your ID"

I calmly waved my hand from side to side, like the Oswego Rainbow greeting. "You dont need to see my ID. Go about your business"

He furiously waved back, more in agitation than in reciprocity of the joy I had just sent to him. He responded "No I really need to see your ID. It's NY state law and I can't have kids like you go running around drinking and doping on all these evil substances, having sexual relations, hopping national borders and then driving, and not carrying a proper indication of who you are, with a photo liscense. I just serve the product, I dont believe in it."

"You dont need to see my ID. Go about your business"

So I put my hand on my head and concentrated harder. I began to debate with myself. “We needs it. Must have the precious relief. They stole it from us. Sneaky little bartender, wicked, tricksy, false. No, not master DJ Depth. .. Master’s my friend. You don’t have any friends. Nobody likes you. Not listening. I’m not listening. You’re a liar. And a thief. DRUGGIE. Go away. . . . I hate you. . . . Leave now and never come back.”

The ID tender watched with a bit of fright. He began to choke, mysteriously with no one around, grasping his neck to relieve the pressure. Instead, I turned to one the pixie waitresses. Mama told me never to use the word c*cktail.

I asked her if she wanted to see my golashes and then told her she was the chosen one. Her look of disgust underscored the intimidation that one often feels when seeing such large plastic boots for the first time. She couldn't handle it.

The strobing lights, the pulsating bodies, the drugs......what a moving symbolic depiction of the disaster! I realized what a powerful statement the Four Party Negotiations, three men and one woman, were making by kissing and feeling each other in the corner. How progressive! I wondered how the packages could be delivered to the most isolated areas, and these Four Party Negotiations were the exact answer.

I ran to help the woman negotiator's pain, but she mumbled something about a "profalactic"? I checked in my Barbie First Aid Kit, that I brought to be the First Aider to the victims, and couldnt find what she talking about. Instead, I sprayed them all with Barbie perfume, trying to get rid of the sweaty, throw up, stench. Tribalism did not need stinky bridges! The guys groaned more, never stopping, but I did manage to get a show of solidarity from the girl, as she exclaimed that she too was "a Barbie Girl, in a Barbie (Relief) World." Mother did not prepare me propa for my journey.

I resolved myself to the fact that the negotiator was refering to nuclear proliferation and she was just acting the part in a revealing play. Adam, Adam, Adam and Eve needed to know that the Garden of Eden could be reborn again and again in the corner/wake of the disaster. I saw just how that could be done.

"Room2: Tsunami (18+)"

Despite some of the strange looks, I continued to record this powerful aid event on my three foot long steno sketchpad, drawing and painting stick figures with carefully recorded illustrations of the make and brands of their various alcoholic beverages. The people were similar in depiction and most of them lay trampled on my artistic floor, with X's for their eyes. Consider it payback for all the rejected love letters, stick girl 23! I write the history, because, like DJ (Senator) "Kemp, [I] always put no less than 110% into my sets. I always know what tracks to lay down to get the floor goin."

The Aiders were enjoying their alcohol, herione (She Ra is a good example), E? (E! entertainment news was here too?), some girl named MaryJane (Watson? Spiderman's girlfriend is backhoeing around without him????), Coke (Pepsi (C!) is not served here), and other drugs (that have forced the impoverished peoples of the Third world into a brutal back breaking subserviance, probably to Walmart(Copyright!). But if you just think....once the partay is done, we'll be giving a lil' of their toil back to dem, through odd cleanup jobs, disposal of used needles, throwup piles, recycling the cans and bottles, and most importantly drug production, etc.), we will turn their economies around!

I noticed that more than a few of my aid friends were dancing with glow-in-the-dark wrist bands and glow sticks strapped all over their heaving bodies. Red, Green, Blues and Oranges flashing to da beat. I now understood how I could join this symbolic dance. I brandished my lightsaber and too began to wave my hands around in a non-rhythmic fashion.

First I tried "Da Robot," continuing to move as I normally do, with rigid hand movements, ubrupt uttering of non-sense, and sudden jerks with my head. Yoda has taught me well. It came naturally as I flashed my neon-deadly weapon side to side. The crowd watched my techniques in amazement as I fell to the floor and belly flopped forward, balancing my sabre on my back. When I left my parent's deathstar, I was but the learner, now I am the master, of neon flashing techniques. That was the night I became a break dancer.

I akwardly stumbled, faking a karate flip to my feet, and continued to flail my elegant weapon of funk around, until I realized that the floor was a bit sticky from the blood and gore that I had created. I was ostracized for a bit, and the big bouncer even tried to make a move towards me, until I claimed I was his father and cut off his hand. Needless to say that the majority of the crowd was waiting to get on E! (entertainment news?) anyways, so the whole "incident" as the evil empire/police refered to it, went pretty much unoticed and as far as they knew it, just another partay of South Asian tribal culture.

By 5:15 AM I felt as though the crowd's ability to aid the victims was diminished. They looked tired. I was wide awake, suffering from Double Vision, numbness in various portions of ma body, and had an overall feeling of weightlessness. Other than my battle canteen full of juicy water, and some pills given to me by a trusted stranger, I cannot really think of why. Yet my inspiration for this event reached its climax. I pulled the plug on the mixing table and grabbed the announcer's microphone. I was overcome with an emotional choonz. The Speech.......

"My Choonz!: Check my Flow, Yo:"

"I see in your eyes....."

a raver interrupts "No Mr. Frodo!"

"........the fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails. When we forsake our friends, and break all bonds of fellowship. But it is not this day. This day WE FIGHT! There can be no triumph. Without loss, No victory, Without suffering, No freedom, Without sacrifice!"

The applause, even from the Head of State DJ's, brought much needed aid.

Sacrifice? Wow, this night was full of it. But what would be the ultimate sign of relief?

The group was so spaced out, drugged up, and so overcome with tribal culture, that we all agreed that the shortest, weirdest looking person up in this piece should be cannibalized immediatly as a sacrifice. We easily built a fire from the useless rap records, and began our aid. It was ugly for a while, organs flying, banter in strange tongues......but we couldnt see, hear, smell, evil anyways, so eventually we had both sacrifice and relief. I was the Lord of the Reliefs and for a time the ravers carried me around on a table, with makeshift palms and glowsticks to highlight my Choonz. I was their emperor in the wake of the disaster. I was at the top of progressive tribalism, a world diverse enough to include cannibals, Barbie, the ugly, and the true meaning of the Force, of Relief.

Waiting for the Next Disasta.........

The winner of the Quiz next time, if I can finish grading the thirty to forty responses! Keep sending them, no matter who you are!!!