Yesterday's News
(Peter Barnes)
Write your abstract
here.
Anna, the 113 year old heroine of YESTERDAY'S NEWS,
tells an interviewer the story of her life on an
evening
she's to be presented to the Queen. In Thatcher-
conservative cadences (A conscience wouldn't have
helped us
in two world wars), language dry as dust mingled with
day
old spittle, she tells of a life heroically given over
to
the one consistent principle of Thatcherism:
untrammeled
greed. Beginning with the sale of her maidenhead in
collusion with her mother (twenty times between the age
of
thirteen and eighteen), she makes her living at various
times as a whore, madam, white slaver, dope peddler,
back
alley abortionist, traitor (her role in two world wars
was
to sell secrets to the Germans) and murderer of at
least
one inconvenient husband. From time to time she takes
note
of her handsome young interviewer's beautiful hair, in
brief attempts at seduction. Then she remembers the
story
she mentioned at the beginning, that she wants to tell
the
Queen when presented (this story is partly adapted from
a
passage in Ben Hecht):
A charlady in one of her brothels, Mrs. Allen, had
her
children taken away by social services. People would
say,
after her husband died, that she'd come home drunk and
was
an unfit mother. So the authorities took away her four
year
old girl. A while later Anna gave Mrs. Allen a hat of
hers
which Mrs. Allen loved. This they weren't going to take
away from her. She got hold of a hammer and nail, stood
in
front of a mirror, put the nail in the middle of her
head
and hammered it into her skulls.
It shows you shouldn't brood on Yesterday's News,
it
isn't healthy. Others fit in your life as they best
can,
but it's wisest to take an interest in yourself. That's
what keeps her going, and why she'd never consider
driving
a nail into her skull. But the interviewer has such
lovely
hair! The sentences are sounding like a lot of noise
now.
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- Anna Karenina
- The Foretelling
- The Real Love
- My Story
- Anybody Out There?
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