The Race To Save My Audience From ...THE CLIFFS! THE CLIFFS!

Dateline, Victoria

...
Ok
Lets get this straight
I love my audience
Even when a show is as hideous
ghastly and
superultraterrible
as that was
And the whole dreadful hour was a
travesty of theatre
everyone would rather had
not happened
...
So apologies are simply not enough when i race out of my venue after the show to see the audience have already all gone, vamoosed, exited... and, with an awful jolt, i know where they're heading, i know exactly where they're heading ... so i am suddenly on a mercy mission to save them from the very understandable but slightly OTT fate of...
The Cliffs! The Cliffs!
So once i got off stage and confronted the full chastening horror of the past hour for a full nightmare minute, i knew there was only one place i could go and only one thing i could do...
The Cliffs! The Cliffs!
To save them from themselves,
from me,
from their sudden understandable desire for a
total and
irredeemable
end to it all
The Cliffs! The Cliffs!
So i stopped a passing car and yanked out the driver
like Steve Buscemi in Reservoir Dogs
and sped off to the cliffs,
crashing three times, and ending up in,
yes in,
a McDonalds...
and having to abruptly steal another...
from a six foot six, brick shithouse security guard ...who
took one look at my demented death-rictus face, and started running,
fast,
much faster than his 250 pounds of muscular bulk would seem to allow
The Cliffs! The Cliffs!
So i'm belting along,
unused to driving on the right,
swerving,
smashing,
screaming expletives and agonised imprecations at a
non-existent God
with a long stream of self-abuse in no sense
adequate enough in the face of
what went on on that stage,
in that chasm of a room,
to those unfortunate
slumping
life-ebbing punters
The Cliffs! The Cliffs!
And as i approach the cliffs i'm suddenly scared that,
like the second Mrs De Winter in Rebecca,
i'm too late...
and i see my kamikaze audience are already there and
like Zombie Lemmings,
they are staggering towards the cliffs to...
throw themselves off
...
but handily the horrific show has so utterly enervated them,
has so vanquished and vanished every
remaining energy
except the inner screen urgently flashing
Die! Die! Die!
that they have yet to reach the edge of very darkness
The Cliffs! The Cliffs!
Die! Die! Die!
So i hurtle off the road onto the green and
smash heavily and loudly
into some concrete posts,
cursing and shouting ...
which brouhaha briefly
distracts them from their voidward stagger so i can
run in front of them at the clifftop and imploringly shout
NO, NO, NO,
DON'T,
I'M SORRY, I'M SORRY I'M SORRY...
except i then foolishly try to reason with them
by saying, it wasn't that bad
so they can all slowly groaningly reply,
Y-e-s I-t W-a-s,
as the first of my woebegone audience flow past me and
over the edge and suddenly,
hideously,
they are pouring past me out and down
The Cliffs! The Cliffs!
...
Except...
after a characteristically
self-indulgent brief moment while i
ponder the undeniable fact this does not
constitute a good review...
i look down behind me and see its not really a cliff,
cos this is Victoria
and they don't do really cliffs...
but some of my tragic clientele have
broken bones and are
writhing and crawling around the rock and sand on an
impassioned mission to
reach the sea and
immerse their forever within its unfolding endlessness...
...
Then i woke up... And discovered it was all ...

true.

...
...

this story would seem a lot truer to me if i could
reconcile it with the fact i
did actually get a curtain call!
!!!???!!!

which, personally, makes far less sense than the above
...
!!!???!!!
...

first thing i was dead
sorry
first thing that happened was whilst making my entrance i
fell over the curtain
...
that was the good bit
...