Please print, choose one monologue, and prepare thoroughly
Feel free to change gender pronouns as needed
#1.
When
you have someone over there, you have a different calendar than everyone
else. Most calendars look forward –
Church picnic next Sunday, Easter is in 3 weeks, just two more months ‘til
summer. But our calendar only looks
backward – he went away one month ago,
its been 5 weeks since he left, this is the 2nd Christmas he’s been
gone. We don’t know when he’ll be
back. All we know is what it says on the
paper he signed, “Duration plus 6”. The
duration of the war, plus six months. So to fill the missing hours, we wrote
letters, which we tried to make sound cheerful:
Happy Anniversary! Not the big
one of course, this is your 6-month anniversary of being away. Noah and I celebrated by drawing pictures,
which we’ve enclosed. In case you
couldn’t quite tell, Noah drew a bear.
Mine started out as a bear, but we thought it looked more like a car, so
now it's a car. At church last Sunday
Noah shared the peace with the new couple with the baby, and that made everyone
laugh. We decided to stay around for the
youth group breakfast but the pancakes were dry, so we left.
#2.
He
knows how much a 4 year old can change in 6 months, he doesn’t need to be
reminded. Did he need to hear he was missing his son write his name for the
first time, or sing all of Hey Jude by himself?
My stomach ties in knots when I have to drop him off at day care, and
that’s when I know I’ll be back in 8 hours and won’t go through a war zone
before I can hold him again. Usually we
got emails, but every once in a while there would be a letter. I loved those the best because it was
something tangible. His pen marks on the
paper... a tiny little piece of him. “You
deserve a longer letter than this; but it is my unhappy fate seldom to treat
people so well as they deserve” Jane
Austen. OK, he wasn’t quite that poetic, but
it didn’t matter to us. What mattered
was that letter
#3.
Of
course I knew he lied on his application.
I always knew when he lied. I
knew he lied the day he and Kenny Hoff spilled whitewash all over the front
stoop and told me it was the Gunderson boy from across the road. I knew he lied the night he told me that he
didn’t sneak out to holler to Marianne Dutch out her bedroom window, and I knew
he lied about this. But in the spring of
1943 all anyone at the church could talk about was what happened in Warsaw, and
the boys wanted to protect us. They
talked about honor, and they spoke of their duty. So I looked the other way. The night before
he left, we sat at the kitchen table and I looked him square in the eyes. “Be of good courage”, I told him. “Be honest. Be upbeat. Be of good cheer. No
room for phonies. And the lowest thing of all is to become a thief.” That was my advice. What else could I say?
