Drinks Before Dinner Read Online Free Page A

of them, except I suppose our last feeling before we die. When we have got life to stop to accommodate our feeling, we die. And what we said about it and felt about it is gone, and what we thought is gone, and our anger is gone, and the expression of our eyes and the character of our smiles, that’s all gone. And if we knew how to embroider or sing “Bye Bye Blackbird,” that’s gone too.
JOEL    So it is clear, then, that those who do best in life are those who get on with it. Life is surely merciful to those who get on with it. Yes. So that is what we do. We get up in the morning and go about our business. We get up and go to our jobs, if we have jobs, or to the unemployment lines those who don’t have them. And there is the holding of a job and then losing it, or the looking for a job and not finding it, and of course the getting of a job and hating it. All that is getting on with it. Meeting someone, making a marriage of whatever duration, is getting on with it. Having a job and having a family is surely getting on with it. And everyone each morning, no matter what his or her feelings, gets up and gets on with it. And that is what makes the romance of the cities.
MICHAEL    I beg your pardon, did you say the romance of the cities?
JOEL    Look at those lights. Isn’t that romance? Isn’t that human enterprise shining like a constellation? Don’t tell me I can’t walk in the park at night. We’re a great civilization. There was poverty and disease in Renaissance Italy. There was filth and degradation in Edwardian London. Were these not great civilizations? You feel the romance of the city by living in it. You feel it in the lights of the evening, you feel it in the day when everyone is going about his business. A person’s spirit is lifted by the doing of what everyone else is doing at the same time.That is the appeal, for example, of public dancing. That is the appeal of soldiers marching. In this country we work on our own behalf but together with others who work on their own behalf. The spirit is lifted by the numbers of people working for their future in the same rhythms as others working for their future. The spirit rises on the numbers of people going about their own business together through the streets in the mornings at random speeds and in different rhythms of walking.
EDGAR    Yes, so that the spirit is lifted that way, I can see that. It is lifted by the numbers of people walking to their places of business. I agree with that. It is lifted too by the numbers of derelicts marching through the streets to their places of business. It is lifted on the dancing steps of child prostitutes and in the happy song of their pimps. It is lifted on the merry tinkle of empty wine bottles breaking against the sides of buildings, it is lifted on the soaring coloratura of the police cars and ambulances and fire engines going about their business. And it’s lifted to its heights in the exhalations of the dying. People who die, as they are murdered in the streets at night or in the operating rooms of the hospitals in the early morning, release with their last scream the great hallelujah of their dying, and altogether the stabbed and shot and butchered and starved, the overdosed and run-over and burned alive, lift the rest of our spirits in their chorus of dying breath so that we may gaze down in philosophic happiness at the greatness of our civilization.
( The sound of the doorbell , JOEL and CLAUDETTE stand and look at each other )
CLAUDETTE    But he said he’d be delayed. ( She goes to the doorway ) No, wait, it’s Grace. Darling!
( Everyone regroups for the new arrival , GRACE enters and is greeted by CLAUDETTE, JOEL , and then by MICHAEL and ANDREA . EDGAR and JOAN are, for a moment, alone )
JOAN    (To EDGAR ) What has gotten into you! Are you aware of the pains they’ve taken to make this evening successful? You’re being awful! Putting everyone in a state, acting like some nasty destructive