Part 80: Elizabeth

“The problem with my mother,” Elizabeth said confidently - Thursday matinee, audience of six (five, required attendance for an Experimental Theater seminar, one an addled old man who found theaters comforting) - “is that she has brain cancer.”

MeghanRose rose instantly. “That is not a problem!” she objected.

“Cancer’s not a problem?”

“Of course it’s a problem, but it’s not a problem with your mother.”

“My mother’s cancer is not a problem with my mother?”

“We are here,” MeghanRose said haughtily, addressing the audience, “to discuss our mothers’ faults and foibles, the ways they've fucked us up and failed us. We are here to have insights and breakthroughs and revelations and epiphanies. We are not here to shame; we are not here to blame.”

“No shame. No blame,” chanted the others in the circle. The sessions were becoming steadily more cult-like with each performance, which was either a commentary on the co-dependence nurtured in support groups or something that was actually happening. Either way, Elizabeth was on the outside: the circle was closing her out as it shrunk.

“I do not intend to shame, I do not mean to blame,” Elizabeth said in her theatre-voice, realizing as the words left her mouth that she sounded like a Dr. Seuss character. “But is this not a forum in which we can speak our minds? If not here, then where? Have we perhaps lost our way, strayed from our ideals of freedom of speech and freedom of thought?”

“No shame. No blame,” MeghanRose said firmly. 

The message was clear: Elizabeth was out of the cast.