The Puppeteer Trilogy by Mike Marino (book recommendations for teens txt) 📖

to life as Paul Butterfield. Even though he wasn’t he sure sounded as if he could have been...his money maker hd his mojo working overtime on that blues harp….

It was no 6 P.M. and the recital doors were open to let in the invite crowd to enjoy some wine and cheese and finger foods before the “event” got underway. T. Rex and K. Morphine were on pins and needles...they had hitched their pony to this experimental wagon...if it was a success...all three of them, T. Rex, K. Morphine Alexia Dyslexia would ride the art rocket to the moon.

If it was a disaster...think Titanic where they would all end up not in the glamorous world of the arts, dance and theater...but rather wearing a paper hat at a fast food drive through where instead of offering culture on the halfshell...you could only offer a free refill and a bag of fries. It would be Lobster versus Cheetohs….Prime Rib versus a TV dinner of frozen meat loaf. Sex with Raquel Welch or Ruth Buzzy!

Time now to work the room...prime the pump...run the flag up the old pole...It was almost showtime!!

Chapter Thirteen

 

T Rex was surprised to see a pro model 16mm Bolex movie camera in place by the stage on a supportive tripod with  Kathleen Morphine peering through the viewfinder intently it reminded him of all those WWII propaganda films of Nazi U Boat commanders ...up periscope looking for allied shipping to send to a watery grave. She was flitting about the stage area  using a hand held light meter to gauge her aperture settings. This was no home movie camera… this was a serious documentary industrial grade tool that she had been working with for months now under very clandestined hush hush conditions! I’m ready for my close up Mr. Demille. All that was missing was an old golden age of Hollyweird mansion on Sunset Boulevard, a dead monkey on a slab and William Holden shot dead floating  face down in the pool.

 

Kathleen Morphine had obviously been holding out on us.

 

“Don’t look too surprised Fitz. (She always called him that to yank his chain and break his balls.)  “I’ve been experimenting with motion pictures and surprise...ta da...this will be my first exploratory dip in the documentary oceans. Sorry I’ve been keeping it a state secret, but I wanted to make sure I had the hang of the damned thing first. Tonight’s performance will be captured in striking film noirish black and white motion.. I’ll get still shots too for the mag piece we’re working on.. “

 

I was now working with a very clever  female Fritz Lang and could see it now…”Metropolis: The Musical!”

 

We were both taken by surprise earlier as Alexia in addition to the Booze and Blues Street Band had also hired other musicians of the classical kind you would find in a fine orchestra doing Mozart or Beethoven which included a  female Asian violinist (if you look carefully all violinists in symphonies today are Asian females), a french horn player (You don’t have to be French to play with your horn!) a flutist , an oboe and a cello

 

Secretly, they all had been practicing together with the street band on the ballets playlist and if ever there was a more diverse diorama  of organic symphonic talent gathered under one roof….this was it.

 

The musicians were in place tuning up, the lights dimmed slowly enveloping the sold out crowd in darkness.  The two young university students manning the spotlights and gels for various effects to match the music and the movements were set to go. It had all the potential to be the  Liebeslieder Walzer with lava lamps.

 

“Me thinks our little ballerina will be moving to the top of the modern dance foodchain before you know it! Impressive!” Kathleen could only agree with a nod as she too was as surprised as a turtle in the middle of the road facing it’s demise at the hands of a  Firestone tire at 70 MPH.

 

Alexia also had been working and grooming  young ballet students.

 

Conducting the arrangements that blended blues, jazz and classical musicians was a young baton as lightsaber maestro Marcello Pesto Al Dente who was formerly a tuba player for the Salvation Army Band in Gary, Indiana.

 

The lights dimmed, the stage left alone  bathed in a narcotic darkness portending something momentous was about to emerge and immerse the audience in its wake. Maestro Marcello tapped his baton gently on the music stand as the spotlights highlighted Alexia Dyslexia as the lithe and lovely alabaster white  swan soon to be magically transformed into Odette who falls in love with the virgin Prince Siegfried the hunter.

 

Odette was obviously the victim of an evil spell hit and run which was common in those days. Sleeping Beauty bobbing for apples is but one example of mayhem and black magic that befell heroine after heroine not to be confused with heroin or cocaine...both of which were mainstay drugs of  Munchkins and Seven Dwarfs. High Ho, High Ho, off to the dealer we go!

 

The swans began swimming as the opening oboe blended with first the flute before being overcome completely by a frenzy of violins. The classical mixture of music carried  cast and audience alike aboard a gentle magic carpet ride into the symphonic stratosphere where they met a high altitude crescendo that was soon met by perfectly synchronized   blues guitars, jazzed up keyboards and the lonely wail of a saxophone. Strangely enough the concoction was flawless in its performance of the lilting waltz in the opening  and especially in “The Dance in the Cygnets”

 

The choreography was a masterful blend of motion  complimenting the scenery of the romantic lake where the two meet, a fancy ballroom at the castle and the lake once again on a dark, tragic night. (Cue the saxophone whenever things are dark and tragic!)

 

The movements were graceful, awe inspiring and rebellious as the dancers improvised here and there mating classic ballet movements with more modern slightly jazzed up  dancing steps combining with some jive jitterbugging with a feel of bobby soxers at the high school prom, than back to ballet again. The symphonic sound swallowed the ballet sequences while the blues-rock riffs would replace it seamlessly for the more frenzied American Swans Got Talent segments.  Woodstock had now met the Bolshoi..and the result was remarkable.

 

All the while Kathleen Morphines 16MM was whirring away, eating frame after frame, collecting the beauty and grace of the leg movements as difficult as any athletic endeavor. The black and white film capturing the shadows and lights and music perfectly. You couldn’t have asked for more if you were filming porn. Alexia Dyslexia and her handsome Prince Siegfried, which by the way was a young dancer and noted Catholic bi-sexual bingo player, Dimitri Alexander von Douche, were a perfect match.

 

The ballet planets were in harmonious synch, and it was all captured on film, both motion and still shots that alone were works of art...I was writing the review as the performance progressed. One..Two...Three...Kick Ass!

Chapter Fourteen

 

The past had passed...10 years in fact having  receded in the rearview mirror, where nostalgia and other objects may appear closer than they are.

 

Alexia Dyslexia had bloomed in the rose garden of modern and ballet dance where her sheer determination and innovation elevated her to the pinnacle of performance art in New York, Paris, Berlin and London. London! Home of Big Ben, the Tower of London,  The River Thames, Monty Python, Jack the Ripper and fish and chips.

 

She lives in London where she maintains her modern dance studio where young people who want to break into ballet, choreography  and strip club pole dancing flock as lemmings ready to leap off the novice cliffs in hopes of landing a professional position with The American Ballet Company or perhaps as a dancing Puerto Rican  in yet another incarnation of “West Side Story”.

 

In fact, she had successfully choreographed and directed a modern dance topless version of “My Fair Lady” that opened recently at the Top Hat Mens Theatre complete with Eliza Doolittle performing a lap dance for Professor Higgins. Higgins, played by the Rex Harrison’s grandson, belts out a version of “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like A Man” with a bevy of bisexual and in some cases trisexual transvestite dancers.

 

As for Kathleen Morphine, she now resides in Key West as a world class documentary filmmaker and  photographer. In addition to producing diverse documentaries that range from the educational “Why Pelicans Date Rape  Flamingos” to “The Life Cycle of Land Crabs” to her Academy Award Winning Docu-short “Is That a Conch Shell in Your Pants, or Are You Happy to See Me?” the definitive exploration of the wild thing swinging singles scene in Miami  Retirement Communities where geriatric wheelchairs and walkers become the Centrum Silver version of “The Fast and the Furious!”

 

National Geographic had just given a freelance assignment to go Africa to expose the horrific ritual where live Pygmies are used as human bowling balls, basketballs, and hood ornaments on luxury automobiles in Cape Town.

 

T Rex Fitzgerald no longer had to make a living writing fortunes to be implanted into fortune cookies for the Shanghai Fortune Cookie Company. Confucius was confusing enough. A Western writer posing as a Tibetan monk expounding one sentence one hand clapping Oriental “predictions” was ludicrous.

 

He had finally written his great American novel “The Not So Great Gatsby” that sold millions. He travels frequently now from New York to San Francisco performing to sell out crowds his one man stage play portrayal depicting through spoken word the life and times of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera as the split personalities who inhabit the psyche of Doc Yucatan, a noted gynecologist to the stars. He plays all three parts.

 

T Rex had never left Boston. It was home...it was comfortable and he now lived high aloft in a Penthouse overlooking the city giving him a birds eye few of night time muggings including the murder of Louie the Gimp, small time hood, hustler  and carnival worker in charge of the Tilt-a-Whirl. Seems Louie had crossed the wrong wise guys getting caught trying to pick the pocket of John Gotti who was in the crowd in the park during a Monkees Reunion Tour.

 

Every now and then, T. Rex would wander to the old industrial neighborhood where he, Kathleen morphine and Alexia Dyslexia  were all neighbors in apartments in buildings that were once factories that made everything from buttons to genuine voodoo dolls. The neighborhood