"Ellen Schoeters is a member of Actorama + where actors can upload a monologue or scene performance for peer review. What do you think of Ellen Schoeters's performance?"
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| Character | Brett | |
|---|---|---|
| Gender | Female | |
| Age Range(s) | Young Adult (20-35), Adult (36-50) | |
| Type of monologue / Character is | Talking to the audience, Reminiscing life story/Telling a story | |
| Type | Comic | |
| Period | Contemporary | |
| Genre | Comedy | |
| Description | The Dinner Party - Brett talks about why she may have been fired from her job as a nanny/cook/maid. | |
| Details | "Nanny. Not." Middle of the Book | |
Summary
Brett talks about why she may have been fired from her job as a nanny/cook/maid.
Written by Jass Richards
| Excerpt |
|---|
| I suspect she was just pissed about the dinner party. They had a lot of day-long dinner party things, for which we spent much of the previous day preparing. I 'took care of' the vegetables. Interesting how flexible the definitional limits of that phrase are. On the first of such preparation days, I washed the piles she had put on the counter: potatoes, carrots, celery, tomatoes, other red things, white things, and a bunch of green stuff I didn't recognize. Then I thought I was through. The look she gave me indicated otherwise. "You may as well peel them now," she said, tactfully, as if I had planned to peel them later. Right. As if. So, remembering my mother's manufactured obsession with white, I peeled the brown skins off the potatoes. There went the vitamins. Next I glanced over, the She-Bitch-Wife was still supervising me from the other end of the large kitchen were the carrots. Beets too had to be peeled. Who knew? I'd spent the previous year living on potatoes (unpeeled) (and raw), apples (ditto) (ditto), canned beans, and Shreddies. (I could say that that was due to the lack of a fridge and a hotplate. But I'd be lying.) When I started on the celery, I got another look. The tomatoes too were spared. Okay, now I'm done. I rinsed my hands and dried them on a towel. "Slice and dice!" she said sweetly though really I'm just guessing about that as I moved toward the door. Why would you slice and dice, for example, carrots? They're much harder to eat that way. A fork is required. Mindful of the hours of practice I still needed if I was to pass my exam, I handled this slice and dice task with the greatest of concentration. Then she showed me how to make 'radish roses'. At first I thought anyone who carves radishes into roses has way too much time on their hands. But then I got into what I started to call 'raw sculpture'. I discovered a thing that makes melon balls. And I discovered a melon. I started putting poppy seed happy faces on my little melon balls. Then sad faces, and stern faces, and winks. Recalling the balloon toys of someone's childhood, I joined orange and green melon balls with toothpicks and made a centipede. A happy centipede. Hours passed. Then I remembered Mr. Potato Head. She stopped me when I started dressing my melon creations with Jenny's doll clothes. In the meantime, she took care of marinating the meat. Beef, I think. Though it could have been cow. She put it into a pan, poured some stuff over it, and then watched it. An hour after I'd left the kitchen, she was still there, sherry in hand, watching the meat soak. (Perhaps it was a metaphor.) Anyway, at the dinner party in question I noticed a dish of cucumber cubes beside the dish of radish roses she had obviously discovered what I'd done with the cucumber, complete with a cute little sailor hat, and had sliced and diced it. (No doubt that was a metaphor too). ***** |
