Monologue
Where I Come From — Young Man
Richard Nelson
Young Man: (To us:) It’s January, 1987. And we’re but a short walk from the Russell Square Tube stop, on the crescent-shaped street, Cartwright Gardens, home to maybe five or six B & Bs, this being the sitting room of one of them. (He holds a paperback guidebook [Morton’s Americans In London].) There was — and is — much history in these grey streets for Americans. (Holds up the book and opens it.) Just around the corner at 5 Woburn Walk, arrived the poet Ezra Pound with the fresh-off-the-boat and very young Robert Frost to a Monday night ‘at home’ at Mr William Butler Yeats’. It was at this gathering that Mr Frost asked the Irish poet, “Do you really believe in fairies?” (He turns as page.) Guildford Street. (He points it out.) Where Mark Van Doren, while living in the ‘coldest room in London’ got this published in the ‘agony’ column of The Times: (Reads:) “Young American, literary, but interested in everything, desires London friends.” (Turns another page) Great Russell from where Hemingway wrote his father: “Dear Pappy: I can’t think of any more appropriate place to write you from than the reading room of the British Museum with Englishmen as thick as Englishmen and a draft on the back of my neck which I can feel in my balls.” (Turns pages:) T S Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Fred Astaire. (Looks up, then closes the book.) Unfortunately, none of that has any bearing on our story. Instead, ours is a tale of high school students, from a Philadelphia suburb — you’ll meet many of them, the rest are staying at the B & B next door — who are just completing a long hard difficult week — of culture. With the occasional break for shopping to keep their sanity. Tomorrow they go home, so this is their last night. (He turns to Emily.) Emily missed the play tonight. She has a cold. (Emily sneezes.)