The White Elephant in the Room – Part 3

I woke up this morning, got in the shower, and suddenly the 10 minute play I’ve been trying to write for the 48 Hour White Elephant Festival was there. Sometimes it’s like that. One minute you don’t have a play, and the next you do.

I was listening to NPR on CH’s shower radio, and they were talking about how we grow the flu virus in hen’s eggs. And I thought to myself, “I wonder what the aliens will think of that?”

For whatever reason, I have always worried about what the aliens will think of us when they see and hear the stuff they find floating around in space about us – not to mention what they’ll think if we do finally manage to make ourselves extinct and they excavate the planet. I wonder if they’ll cluck their tongues over our short-sighted policies. If they’ll judge us for our rampant materialism. If they’ll label us the Neanderthal species.

Some people have their neighbors, the Jones. I have the aliens.

But as I recently told my friend, Kaboom, one of the best things about being a writer is there’s nothing such as a bad/crazy idea, thought, or experience. It’s all MATERIAL that will one day be harvested and honed into something, that hopefully you, as a writer, can feel makes the bad experience, guilt, or intense alien worry entirely worth it.

Tonight, I came home from work and wrote the whole thing from front to back with a quick rewrite. I even managed to get it in on time despite the allure of a new episode of “House,” which meant putting off my weekly every-character-other-than-House impression.

Just in case you’re wondering, here’s how it goes: Imagine me with a worried look on my face, asking an imaginary House every single dang week, “What if you’re wrong, House? Then the patient will die!”