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!