Leaving Tangier

Book excerpt: Includes: Along For the Ride: Kerrie and Karl both race for the same cab and agree to share. Their subconscious selves ride along, so the audience hears what they say to each other and what they are actually thinking throughout this charming comedy about love at first sight that just takes a while to blossom. ** A Low-Lying Fog:Brotherly love is put to the test as Phil and Greg try to determine what really happened on a day that forever changed their lives. This story of awful mistakes made by good people ¿ and the love that redeems such errors ¿ unfolds as the two men directly address the audience.**Blueberry Waltz:One week after an accident in a Pennsylvania coal mine that trapped men underground, a miner's wife is afraid to move on with life even though her husband was uninjured. His playful, even silly attempts fail to alleviate her obsessive terror. When she says what she really thought during his ordeal, her honesty strengthens their relationship. As a favorite song plays on the radio, they dance and know that they can face the future. ** The Ferry: A pick-up line ("Are you from Staten Island?") turns metaphysical as a woman from Iowa tries to explain how the world works to an insulated Staten Island native. As she speaks, she reveals her prejudices while he, though limited in perception and worldliness, displays the ability to accept what he sees and meet others on equal footing. The Ferry was commissioned by a benefit for families of busboys, dishwashers and other non-salaried restaurant workers in the World Trade Center. **Leaving Tangier:Cooper, an American expatriate poet, has traveled from Tangier to a rural Southern town with the ashes of Oswin Everett Pickett, a famous writer and notorious gay figure who had been living in northern Africa. Pickett left specific instructions that there be no religious observance when his ashes were returned to America, but his great niece and the local preacher are determined to give him a ¿good Methodist funeral.¿ Pickett¿s great nephew, a young man obsessed with the notorious man¿s works, urges Cooper to tell him about his deceased relative. In return, Cooper suggests that the young man should come to Tangier with him. ** Quick and Dirty (A Subway Fantasy): This steamy and provocative wake-up call for daydreamers toys with a potential liaison on a subway platform. There¿s an attractive woman and a good-looking man. Eyes meet. The attraction is obvious, but where does fantasy end and reality begin.