Dead Letters: A Radio Text

DeadLetters Gregory Whitehead Dead Letters is a packet of voices borrowedfrom bodies that have never met. These include postal workers in the Dead Letters Office; the curator for Egiptology at the British Museum, speakingfor the Rosetta Stone; a retired businessmanattempting to be the first individual to memorize and perform the Iliad in ancient Greek; noted handwritingexpert CharlesHamilton , with storiesabout the sale of Napoleon'spenis and the Hitler'sDiary scandal; PAJ editorBonnie Marrancaon the body ofJudy Garland'svoice; and a woman experiencing phantompain after the loss of severalfingers in a car accident The scatteredand polyphonous voices create a highly inflected radio "colloquium" on hou to interpretsuch elusive subjectshard to decipher,hard to put yourfinger on or even to trace. -G. W MUSIC: (Anonymous Tarantella.Sound of a slicingpaper cutter) TITLE VOICE: Dead Letters. (Abrupt vocal gasping: The Wound.) MUSIC: (An excerptfrom Act III of The Makropulos Affair) THE PHILOGRAPHER: Most celebrities tend, in the course of many years, to develop an illegible handwriting. I see that with nearly everybody. Marilyn Monroe, for instance, began by printing her letters very neatly, and wound up by developing a script that is extraordinarilydifficult to read. And the same is true of Judy Garland, who started out with a beautiful, legible handwriting, and wound up with the most vicious scrawl that I think I've ever seen. It just is almost impossible to make out anything. ROSETTA STONE: Gosh. To think what has come from this dreary piece of stone. MUSIC: (Anonymous Tarantella, with throbbing percussion set into the ambiance of some largepublic space.) 71 HARD READER ONE: You want a definition of a "hard," a piece that is considered "hard"? The definition is, one, no name on it, or no address, part of the address missing, the state missing, the city missing. That's a hard . . . all right? It's a jigsaw puzzle that you try to put together, and you have to come to a conclusion, just see where that letter's going to. For instance, a foreign mail coming in saying "225 Broadway, New York." Now. What city is that? It comes here, New York City, because we have a Broadway that's well known. But you could be in Albany, you could be in Kingston, you could be in-what, Jamaica-or anywhere. Anywhere where there's a Broadway. Now, the foreign person-at this particular point, there's nothing we can do with that. We can try it here, in this city, and that's the only thing we can do. At that point, if we can't find it, we'll "kill" it and send it back. And we'll give a reason. The reason why is no city mentioned. So let them, the sender, send it over with the proper city. HARD READER TWO: Let's put it this way. From Greece, you get a letter with a name that's very difficult . . . to decipherHARD READER ONE: Can't decipher it. HARD READER TWO: But ... you keep saying it over, maybe two or three times. And you get the drift of itHARD READER ONE: You get into the habit of talking to yourself. Because you have to verbalize. Sometimes, especially with foreign letters, you gotta verbalize different things in order to catch it in your mind. That's ... that's important with foreign letters. Sometimes it's important with kid letters . . . kids who write. You have to say, OK, I can see it's a kid writing; now what's . . . what's he thinking about? How does he talk? So you've gotta start talking-if you want to, you can do this, I love doing this, by the way, because if you get into the drift of it, it actually-it forms in your mind, it forms on the paper. There's that kind of thing going on. MUSIC: (Anonymous Tarantella,subdued, in same space. Sound of heavy, metallic door slamming.) THE PUZZLER: I like the jigsaw puzzle analogy, in that A, it's a puzzle that there are-big pieces are missing, and there are also four or five pieces that we don't know where they fit. FOSSIL THEATRE: And that's the problem with...