10 November
Dearest Log,
I write these words with sorrow-laden fingers. It has been a truly awful, utterly harrowing, thoroughly devastating, terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. My beloved Hedy--flesh of my flesh, light of my life, fire of my loins, hogger of my bedclothes, loyal helpmeet, esteemed colleague, eternal soulmate and snappy dresser--has been named (one's digits choke on the words!) a "person of interest" in a murder investigation! Horrors upon horrors!
Worst of all, it's all my fault. I insisted on dragging her to that ghastly Hallowe'en soiree thrown by the Chicago Tribune for we, its beleaguered employees. A ghoulishly frightful evening indeed! After all the Trib-affiliated revelers had departed--wending their drunken ways to their respective abodes whether they be Lake Shore condos or that emblem of Windy City suburbia, the bungalow--one guest remained behind . . . forever!
Yes, stowed away in a custodial storage area as though it were of no more worth than a package of those sheets one affixes to one's Swiffer Wet Jet was the cold, lifeless, becostumed corpse of Trib columnist Mary Schmich--that sage scribess whose luminescent commentary on the foibles of modern life had delighted many a dedicated reader, including this one. A Serbian cleaning lady, who had no doubt fled her war-torn Balkan homeland in hopes of never seeing again sights such as these, found poor Mary garroted--o ignoble end!--with a length of elastic.
We, the guests, were duly questioned by the Chicago Police Department, and I thought that would be the end of it as far as Hedy and I were concerned. But somehow one of our boys in blue--a most diabolical shade of azure, that--discovered, from questioning the others, an unfortunate fact: for a two-hour stretch of time during the festivities--a period that happens to correspond with the time during which Mary was presumably "offed"--Hedy was nowhere to be found. Now, my wife has explained that during this time she was locked in a broom closet, which she had entered to finish some reviews, which were then lost when she dropped her PDA into a bucket of mop water, thus destroying the device and ensuring that she would have no way to contact the outside world until someone happened along to rescue her (as it transpired, this heroic someone was the same Serbian cleaning lady who would later make the much less fortuitous discovery of Mary). Coincidentally, this closet that served as my trapped spouse's prison for her two-hour ordeal is the same closet where the body was found, which is why Hedy's fingerprints are all over the room. For some reason, this explanation, though it seems the very pink of reasonableness to me, looks suspicious to my wife's dogged CPD pursuers, and now she has been hauled in for questioning like some sort of hardened criminal. She's still there now, in fact. O cursed spite! And to think just a few days ago the most upsetting thing I could think of was the shoddy Steppenwolf spoof perpetrated by the inept writers of CBS-TV's The Good Wife!
ELSEWHERE:
My reviews of Theatre Seven of Chicago's The Water Engine: An American Fable and Promethean Theatre Ensemble's Kennedy's Children are in this week's Time Out Chicago.
Comments