Episode Nine Transcript

MARI: Previously in Session Eight

LORI: Yeah – last week was.

KACEY: Weird.

LORI: So weird.

KACEY: Yeah.

 MARI: I ashed a man at work.

KACEY: Was it a colleague or boss?

MARI: It was the copier repair guy.

KACEY: Tell us.

MARI: Well. I was trying to explain the problem I was having with the machine and he was just not listening and then he did that thing where he tried to blame me for the problem and I just…bloop.

BRIA: Ha ha! Bloop.

LEILA: Yeah – bloop, buddy.

LORI: Bloop!

MARI: I know, right? That’s how it rolls. It’s not…yeah, just – bloop.

LEILA: Bloop. Pile of ash.

 BRIA: What if he had some ladies locked up at home? And now they can escape.

MARI: But what if they starve to death in there because he doesn’t come back to feed them?

 KACEY: This is all hypothetical, you know.

MARI: Sure. But it feels very real.

KACEY: Real, like you’re really afraid he might actually have some women locked in his basement?

MARI: Kind of, yeah. Now I’m not going to sleep tonight because I’m going to be worried about them.

LEILA: Do you have his repair bag? From his visit?

MARI: I’m pretty sure it’s still in the copy room.

LEILA: Well, maybe it’s got his ID with an address in there. And we go and we make sure.

 Theme music begins

JACKI: Recorded live at Jalopy Theatre in Brooklyn

Messenger Theatre Company presents

The Defense

This is Session 9

KACEY: Well – look who it is! The team of heroes!

MARI: Awww. Hush.

KACEY: And we’re going to have to give a medal to your Defense AND your Bad Feeling Meter for really stepping up. Four women in that basement, Mari! Four!

MARI: I knew he was a creep but yeah – this was…extreme sicko territory.

KACEY: And all of you taking care of those women, getting them safe and hydrated. I’m so glad you all were there for each other. Did you get any pancakes in the end?

BRIA: We were in the police station for so long, it was morning before it was all over so we got them at actual breakfast time – something I haven’t done in ages.

LEILA: They were pretty good pancakes, I have to say.

LORI: Anything would have tasted good to me by the time we got there, honestly. But they were amazing.

MARI: Not like a muffin, of course. But very good.

KACEY: They kept you all night? Why? Were they suspicious of you?

MARI: A bit. They just kept asking why I went in the house.

KACEY: And what did you say?

MARI: Just that I thought I heard something and I had a feeling.

KACEY: How’d that go over?

MARI: It was a lot of “What kind of a sound? What kind of a feeling?”

KACEY: Sounds like a long night.

MARI: It was.

KACEY: How about you guys? Did they question you too?

LEILA: Not for very long. We were all pretty clear that we were just helping our friend run an errand before going for pancakes.

 LORI: They were a little worried about us going into the house with Mari – but luckily, they responded to the, “She heard a noise, she had a feeling, she was just a lady who needed her friends with her” line.

MARI: I mean. That was true.

LORI: Totally. I just mean we may have played up the damsels in distress act a bit.

LEILA: Oh we were so helpless, Kacey! Poor girls at a loss in the cold dark heartless police station. And I just kept asking after the women from the basement.

KACEY: Did they tell you anything?

LEILA: Not much. Just that they were being taken care of and a social worker was arriving to help interview them. They were so traumatized.

LORI: You got a lot of out of those cops.

LEILA: I just – didn’t let up. Because I was honestly so worried about them. Like, we saw their faces. We saw how wrecked they were. And it only got worse when the police arrived. You’d think they could have, at least, sent women officers – but no, those giant barking ones showed up and scared them even more. I was glad we were there.

BRIA: You know,  It is kind of a miracle that none of our defenses kicked in given what bullies those cops were.

MARI: Big miracle.

KACEY: Do we know what happens next?

MARI: They’re obviously very concerned about where this guy is, so they asked me a lot about him and his whereabouts since I may have been the last person to see him. I mean we all know I was definitely the last to see him but you know what I mean.

KACEY: That sounds really stressful, Mari. What do you think about us getting you some legal support?

MARI: So far they don’t care about me. They just want him, so they want details from me. They’re going to check out his employer, etc. They might stop by my office to just look around.

KACEY: Not to be paranoid but there aren’t surveillance cameras in your copy room, are there?MARI: No. Thank goodness. There are cameras at the entrance of the building– so they might look at that footage but that’s all there is to see – just him coming but not going.

KACEY: Well let me know if you start to feel like a suspect. We do have a team to help with this sort of thing.

MARI: We do?

KACEY: Of course. You’re not the first have used her Defense and gotten into the sights of an investigation.

MARI: I’d imagine so.

KACEY: I mean – we have the advantage that we’re all of us sweet, nice friendly ladies who would never hurt a fly. That fact alone gets us out of a lot of potentially hairy situations. But every so often, somebody looks at a case and gets interested in the person on the surveillance footage who was there when it happened.

BRIA: But – wait – there are cases where there’s video? How come the Defense isn’t documented?

KACEY: Video tends to short out right as it’s about to swing into action so the actual moment of The Defense has never been captured. And listen – everyone – you’re not to start worrying over cameras. It’s useful to notice but what we don’t need is footage of any of you looking for cameras, you know?

BRIA: Right. That looks really suspicious.

KACEY: Quite. I only tell you so you know that there IS a team at your disposal should the need arise.

MARI: Great. Good that’s good.

BRIA: And we’re all in it with you, Mari.

LORI: Totally.

LEILA: The Pancake Posse strikes again.

BRIA: I just read about this group of women gangsters in London at the turn of the century and part of how they got away with crime-ing for so long was that no one would believe they were criminals. Nice looking well dressed ladies? No way they’re robbing the place. But they were absolutely robbing the place.

LEILA: Did they have a name?

BRIA: The Forty Elephants.

LEILA: I love it.

LORI: I would not have pegged you for a gangster, Bria.

BRIA: I am irredeemably attracted to it because I so could never. Could never.

LEILA: You could never.

BRIA: Never.

LEILA: Lori, though.

LORI: Hey!

LEILA: I think you could.

LORI: You’re right. I could.

MARI: You could! I see it!

LORI: I don’t know why I could but I could. I’d feel bad about it but I could.

LEILA: I think Mari could, too.

MARI: You think?

LEILA: Under the right circumstances, sure.

MARI: I don’t know.

LORI: Aw, come on. Join my girl gangster gang.

MARI: Alright, I’m in. You’re right. I could. That’s the circumstance.

LEILA: I knew it.

MARI: Could you?

LEILA: I think I could, like, run it – but I don’t think I could be on the floor, as it were.

MARI: Really?

LEILA: Yeah. With the appropriate distance and the right organization? I could do it. If I were in charge.

BRIA: I don’t want to be left out! Maybe I could be a look-out or something.

LEILA: No, you could never. You’d break in a second.

BRIA: Maybe I could.

LEILA: You could never.

BRIA: You’re right. I could never.

MARI: We’d never let you ruin your life in the gang!

LORI: You’d be like the kid on the corner that the gang always protects and sends to college with their crime money.

BRIA: Oh perfect.

MARI: Yeah and you graduate and the whole gang is so proud and we send you to some other city where you can’t be tainted by our dirty money.

KACEY: I’m enjoying the tales of the Pancake Posse.

BRIA: Me, too. But maybe we’ve gotten off topic?

KACEY: No, no. Of course not. This time and space is for you. For every single one of you and we can do with it what you like.

BRIA: Today, apparently, we wanted to start a gang.

KACEY: A benevolent gang that sends you to college.

BRIA: I could have really used this going way back when.

MARI: Me, too.

BRIA: But you’re not really going to start a gang now, right?

LEILA: Bria! It was you who told us about it!

BRIA: I know. But now I’m worried about it.

LEILA: We are not starting a gang. But we are a group and if any trouble arises we’ll take care of it.

KACEY: And you’ll have the support of the whole Defense Society.

LORI: Why do we never see the others? Like – why don’t we have a convention?

KACEY: When groups started forming, they did gather in bigger and bigger clusters. One cluster would meet another cluster and become a bigger cluster and so on. But we started to get a lot more attention than was safe for everyone.

MARI: How so?

KACEY: Well, you know how whenever you go out with a group of women – there’s some asshole who starts to make jokes about starting a coven or everyone getting their period together or some mess?

LEILA: Always.

KACEY: Well. The groups got so big, it started to freak those kinds of people out. They’d call the cops to report us as a brothel or pile up firewood around a pole outside “as a joke.” We just felt it would be safer for everyone if we kept our groups small.

BRIA: Safer for everyone?

KACEY: Well. Safer for the men, honestly. We were all fine, of course. But…you know. You threaten a massive group of women who have the Defense with a pile of wood, for example…well. It’s not the women who get burned. We just felt we’d make a lot more progress if there wasn’t a death count every time and every place we got together.

LORI: Wow. Yeah. I can see that.

KACEY: And the clusters solved another problem that we’d been wrestling with, too.

BRIA: What was that?

KACEY: Well – when the groups grew to over a thousand, they tended to be less helpful. There was less intimacy in our discussions. Everything got louder and more contentious. We felt we could all be more helpful to one another in small groups. The big group exists for times when numbers are needed – but for most things, we’ve found that the small groups are more effective and better for the participants.

MARI: But the big numbers mean that we can call on them for things like legal struggles and press issues and so on.

KACEY: Exactly. And there are some small groups of specialized women. There are groups of elders who’ve been with the society from the start. There are groups of journalists – groups of lawyers. The group of lawyers is ready to work if we need them.

MARI: I see. It’s not that there’s some law firm on retainer. It’s that we have among us lawyers who specialize.

KACEY: And they have colleagues to call on, should we need. Just because sometimes the cases can feel a little personal to those that have the Defense. It’s better to turn those things over to folks who aren’t quite so invested in the outcome.

LEILA: Wouldn’t want to trigger the Defense while defending someone.

KACEY: Well. Exactly. That is exactly the concern.

BRIA: So these other lawyers…do they know about the Defense, then?

KACEY: Some do. Some don’t. It’s good to have a mix. For the ones that don’t know, we’re just a women’s group. Like a club. They can be pretty useful because they see the explanations that those of us with knowledge of the Defense might not think of.

LEILA: What do you mean?

KACEY: Well – to us – we see a man who appears to have died from an invisible sword to the guts – we think, “Well, that’s an interesting Defense someone has.” The unexplained is often very easily explained by the Defense. It’s obvious to us. But someone who doesn’t know the Defense exists will think of other explanations. They’ll think – of, I don’t know –an icicle or space junk falling, a wire from a building. They’ll entertain alternate ideas and can build a case for things we can’t even imagine.

LEILA: Right. Because for us the explanation is always the simplest.

LORI: It’s just usually the Defense.

KACEY: Usually. Anyway -  I think you’re all doing really well and I’m proud of how you’re taking care of one another, honestly. It’s not my thing to be proud of – but I’m still …just so proud of every single one of you.  You saved those women’s lives together. You all encouraged Mari to go – to trust her instincts – then you found a way to help her do it AND you went for pancakes. I mean…so good. Now – do we have anything else we need to discuss.

LORI: One thing –

KACEY: Please.

LORI: Well. You know how you said there was a Rage Time coming? Like a stage?

KACEY: Yes.

LORI: How will I know when that happens?

MARI: You won’t be able to miss it.

BRIA: Yeah, it’s very obvious.

KACEY: Why, are you feeling it?

LORI: Well. No. It’s just that I got a little mad the other day thinking about everything. Like those women in the basement and then I started to wonder if one of them had the Defense and then I was mad when I realized she DIDN’T have the Defense because if she’d had it, she for sure wouldn’t have been in that basement for us to release her and I wished that all women had the Defense and was upset that we were such a small part of the population. And since I’d never really been mad before, I guess I wondered if that’s what rage felt like.

BRIA: Oh buddy.

LEILA: The rage is going to be a shock. You’ve never been mad?

LORI: Not really? Like at my computer or something?

KACEY: I think, Lori, that your Defense is going to bring you to the Rage stage bit by bit. Your anger at the basement situation is a really good thing to be angry about! It’s infuriating! So your system gave you a small dose. I think we can expect several little doses from here before the Rage moves through you.

LORI: So that wasn’t it?

KACEY: I don’t think so. Perhaps we shouldn’t have told you about it. You’re worrying over it already.  

LORI: I just – I was so upset!

KACEY: That’s because it’s upsetting! There are a lot of things to be mad about and you’ve just found the first one.

LORI: But I don’t want to be mad.

BRIA: It’s actually kind of fun.

LORI: What?

BRIA: I mean – the Rage stage for me was fun. And now when I get mad, I feel…kind of good actually. I used to be afraid to be mad but now if I want to break something, it feels kind of energizing.

MARI: Yeah – powerful.

LEILA: It actually feels better.

LORI: What do you mean?

LEILA: I was like you – I would have told you I didn’t know how to get angry. I’d cry instead.

LORI: I do that.

LEILA: Well – now I get mad and I punch pillows and I feel better. No one suffers and I work out some stuff.

LORI: I mean that sounds fun. Still not so keen.

KACEY: Maybe it won’t happen to you! Not every journey is the same. But if it does – we’re here. And I also wish those girls in that asshole’s basement had had the Defense.

LEILA: They were very young. They might get it yet.

LORI: But wouldn’t that be the right time to develop it? Right then? When you’re in the process of being victimized?

KACEY: I agree. It would be. Unfortunately, as I think we’ve all discovered – the Defense does not always arrive at the right time and even wishing it would does no good.

LORI: That is not fair.

KACEY: Not at all. It is not in the least bit fair. The Defense is not justice. It is just the Defense and it comes when it comes. AND it usually doesn’t come at the first encounter with evil. It also has never come before a woman turns 25.

LORI: What?! There is no one under 25 with the Defense?!

KACEY: Not that we know of.

LORI: I’m 27!

KACEY: You’re one of the youngest we have.

MARI: Most of us were in our early 30s before the Defense kicked in.

LORI: Really?

KACEY: Yep. There are some theories that suggest we need at least 25 years to grow it – that its dormant in us and our various experiences help form it and ready us to see it.

LORI: This is wild.

MARI: I thought we all just happened to be this age.

KACEY: Most new groups are about your age

BRIA: What?

KACEY: I’m a bit older than most of you and I have my own group of women. And we were in our early 30s when we got the Defense and found each other.

LORI: We’re not your only group?

KACEY: You’re my only group that I facilitate but yes I have another group of which I’m a part.

LORI: Wow.

KACEY: And part of what we talk about in my group is how to help our groups the most. It’s all designed to help us be helpful.

LORI: Who designed it?

 KACEY: The women who were here before us. They understood that it would have to be remade for each group, that your values would be different than my values and my values would be different than those of the women before and they wanted to make sure that it would be a world of working it out with your peers, not handed down like an old dress that never would really fit.

LORI: That’s pretty smart.

KACEY: I’m sure in their own groups, they complain about how surly my generation was – how sarcastic or disaffected or whatever but it was never an issue because we were as we were with ourselves and you are as you are with yourselves and I do my best to stay out of your business.

LORI: I like when you’re in our business.

BRIA: I do, too.

KACEY: Thank you. But I want you to always remember that this is YOUR group. I’m just here to try and help and if you ever feel I’m not helping, you just go on without me. Going on without your facilitator is, in fact, a sign of growth and lets us know we’ve done our jobs.

LORI: Not yet, though, right?

KACEY: No, no. Not yet. Only when it’s time. For you. It could be decades from now. There’s no hurry. I’m here for as long as you need me.

LORI: Phew.

MARI: I second that.

BRIA: I third it.

LEILA: And I fourth! That is four phews!

KACEY: I’m not trying to scare you into letting me go; I just want you to know that should such a time come, I would take it as a positive sign, not an affront. But I think that time may be a while off.

LORI: Phew.

BRIA: Phew.

MARI: Phew.

LEILA: And phew.

KACEY: You all are very kind.

MARI: Pancake posse knows which side to butter our pancakes on.

LORI: The top?

BRIA: I like to put a pat between the pancakes so, it’s really both sides.

LEILA: I do that, too.

MARI: This metaphor was ineffective.

LORI: Now I want pancakes.

BRIA: Me too.

LEILA: Shall we? Kacey will you join us?

KACEY: I’d love to but I have another meeting to get to.

LEILA: Your group?

KACEY: Yep. Have a hot buttered pancake for me.

Theme music begins

JACKI:

The Defense is a production of Messenger Theatre Company.

It is performed by Marcella Adams as Leila, Amber Jessie as Mari, Cosmic Kitty as Bria, Kristen Vaughan as Kacey and Toni Watterson as Lori.

The writer/director is Emily Rainbow Davis.

Sound Design by Matt Powell

Sound Engineering by Daniel Massey

Sound Assistance by Angela Santillo

Stage Management by Ella Lieberman

The Producer is Melvin Yen.

The Defense theme is by Scott Ethier.

I’m Jacki Jing

I am safe but I’m not safe for everyone.