On the rooftops of your city (Cusmello)

[Tori and Ethyl watch as Danno walks past and sits on the ground. Tori approaches him.
SOMEONE walks across the stage with a sign which reads “ROBOTS”]

Tori You always just lurch around, Danno. You just lurch. Like this. Always around this place. It’s pitiful.

Danno Take your pills, Tori. I’m not a stinking robot.

Tori Then say something without that tone. That mechanical tone you always use.

Danno Mechanical?

Tori Like a Goddamn Machine!

Danno I’m not /

Tori / a machine? It’s what you are, stupid! Beep, Beep! [She walks around like a robot; clicking and whirring.] Toaster oven nothing waste!

Danno Where are your pills, Tori?

Tori /Cannot Compute!
[Danno begins searching for Tori’s pills.]

Ethyl Em’ Robot’s lay bricks!
Make em’ Lay em’ all both!

Tori Ha! They shit bricks out, Danno! You shit-brick!

Ethyl So lessen’ you er’ yer daddy were brick layers-

Or were yer daddy a robot?

Cause’a them Gen-etics/

Danno What are you talking about, Ethyl? [Still searching for Tori’s pills]
Ah! [He picks something up from the ground.] Here!

[ENTER NURSE CUSMELLO with GINO trailing behind her. GINO stops to watch what Danno is doing as the Nurse continues on into the center of the room.]

Nurse Cusmello More Pills. More Pills. It’s time for medication.

Danno Tori isn’t taking hers, Nurse

Nurse Cusmello Oh?

Tori Narc!

Ethyl -and that thur’ Danno s’a-robot.

[SOMEONE walks across the stage with a sign which reads “INDIANS”.

EXIT DANNO wandering out of the room, searching for pills in the carpet.]

Nurse Cusmello Nobody is a robot, dear.
Where are your pills, Victoria?

Tori I gave em to the Indians, Bitch! [She screams and runs out of the room.]

Nurse Cusmello Doctor!

Ethyl Wur? Wur them Indians at?

They buildin’ a casino out here?

Shoot! I’ll hit me a jackpot pro-gressive and drive a million dollar car out into California! Be a big movie star like them girls in the celebrity gossip magazines. Wear them big ol’ white sunglasses an’ singin’ happy birthday to the president. Course I’d prolly end up skippin’ all my auditions, though. Workin on my tan. Sittin on that lonesome beach eatin’ tropical kiwis- makin’ love to all them square jawed surfin’ soap opera actors from the 1970’s. (She looks wonderingly to the lights on the ceiling.) –starin’ at that big beautiful California sun. (She squints painfully into the lights and then turns to the nurse.) You think them Indians’d hire me on as a waitress?
[Beat as everyone stares at Faye Ethyl.]

Nurse Cusmello Doctor Argus!
[SOMEONE walks across the stage with a sign which reads “UNICORNS”.]

ENTER DR. ARGUS.]
Dr. Argus Good morning, Gino.

Gino That lady on the left- Cusmo…

Argus -Nurse Cusmello?

Gino Yeah…I don’t know about her. But her dad was one of the science nazis when all of that ‘Miracles as an applied science’ stuff was going on.

Dr Argus The dinosaurs again, Gino? Are you taking your meds?

Gino They were Unicorns, Doc. Weird Quantum alien fuckers- and a little girl- maybe one of the science guys daughters. But somehow She ends up alone in an empty room with one of the goddamn things.

Argus with a /

Gino / unicorn…I honestly don’t know what else to call it.

Argus You can’t …manifest imaginary creatures out of thin air like that.

Gino Well. Apparently you can.

Argus -then it isn’t a unicorn.

Gino I’m going to finish my story. (pause) So she’s in this room with this thing- the girl and the…whatever it is…and she’s petting it and telling it how pretty it is. I mean what little girl doesn’t want a unicorn, right? But then, out of nowhere- a fucking wrought iron zipper spear explodes through the side of it’s head. It misses the girls face by a couple of inches-and she’s backing away, trying to choke out a scream while this…while this freak, alien horse-monster starts convulsing and screeching out baby noises. Baby noises, Argus. It was terrible.

Argus Awful.

Gino I guess as this poor little girl was stumbling backwards trying To process everything- this crazy Samurai freak-job comes running into the room with a sword over his head. He’s got gore soaked unicorn pelts pasted to his chest with dried blood.

Argus Oh no.


Gino Oh yes. And he leaps across the room with this huge, blood soaked samurai sword stretched out in front of him- and he slices this Unicorns head off in midair. The thing is. The head is still stuck into the wall with the zipper spear- so when the body falls to the ground. The head just kind of bobbled there- making direct eye contact with the little girl- begging her for some…finality.

Argus And that’s when the Samurai saw the girl.

Gino -that’s when he saw the girl, Argus. His honor was ruined at that point. He really had only one thing he could do.

Argus Hari Kari.

Gino Correct, Doc. He disemboweled himself then and there, his insides spilling out around her feet.

Argus What happened?

Gino Well, they canceled the program and the little girl lost her appetite for horses. She didn’t grow up to be an equestrian or anything like that.

[Tori runs across the room screaming. The Doc catches her about halfway across. EXIT ETHYL and GINO, terrified.]

Dr Argus Bring me the shot, nurse.

[They administer the shot. EXIT DR. ARGUS. The Nurse is holding Tori’s head. ENTER DANNO. He wraps something around his forehead.]

Danno [Approaching Tori] stay through, kid- keep awake

your arch nemesis is still out there somewhere- hopping around

on the rooftops of your city; and I know you've got blood in your eye or I'd tell you to look. So listen, people die, hotshot.-in

bed-of old age, they die. All the time. They live make difficult choices

take jobs in the city they have kids retire and die. Tori? Victoria?

Ritual Orbit

These are the Principles of Ritual Orbit.

1. Ritual is most effective when crafted by an individual for personal use.

Human Beings are essentially animals that have rebelled against the helplessness of a purely instinctual existence. We grow food because hunting and foraging are unpredictable. We use complex language because it maximizes the efficiency of our rebellion against the forces that would do us harm..

As animals, the universal order would have us fighting amongst one another to stay alive, but as Humans, we fight the universal order instead.

Our nature is to control to survive, and in order to control, we must understand. Therefore, it is that which we cannot comprehend which terrifies us the most, and ritual is our natural defense against these things.

When primitive man witnessed the death of a loved one and then attempted to relate the reality of that death to him self, he was unable to understand it and thus unable to control it’s influence over his existence. So he crafted a ritual as a temporary bridge between what he could and could not comprehend. Inevitably, his tribe found comfort in this satisfying explanation of the darkness- and they began to craft a simple mythology to support it.

Remember, though, that the ritual originated with just one man. If any new insights concerning the true nature of death were revealed to him, he could easily craft a new ritual to accommodate them, or simply modify the original- but since the tribe has adopted his ritual as their own, since there is now a complicated group mythology to support this ‘temporary bridge’- it would be quite difficult for the ritual to adapt itself to anything sudden or new.

2. The focus of a ritual will decrease proportionately to any increase of adherents to that rituals unified community of shared belief.

Say a man crafts a ritual to soothe his fear of the unknown (of death). He sees the sun and calls it a Golden Button and he says that when he dies, his life will wash away into the tide of the Golden Button where he will be warm and happy for all of eternity.

The rest of his hears of this ritual and are immediately comforted by it’s reassurance of protection from the unknown- so they begin to observe it as well. But now, instead of one man focusing all of his attention on one ritual, there are now several people, all slightly less focused on the object of that ritual, and slightly more focused on one another- on the woman they are courting, or the man they are about the marry.

Soon a friendly neighboring tribe hears of this ritual, and gradually, they too begin to attend. There are now so many distracted people involved with this one mans temporary description of the unknown, that when he finally passes away, they are left with a ritual that has no individual interpreter for its design. Since they can no longer turn to him, they turn to what he created instead; they turn to the Golden Button.

They begin to worship it; make sacrifices to it- anything to get some answers or guidance out of it. They create temples and complex manuscripts to bolster their beliefs, and when someone finally stands up and asks the very serious question, “Why are we worshiping a Golden Button?”


3.Societal order is entirely dependant upon the effectiveness of its ritual order, and its ability to adapt to local shifts in culture and science.

It should come as no surprise that a civilization builds itself on principals of shared belief, on common values and similar ideologies. We hold each others hands in the darkness to ward away the helplessness from what we do not understand. We soothe each other against the unimaginable emptiness of space.

When the focus of a ritual has been entirely forgotten by its people- the civilization to which those people belong begins to deteriorate- the people begin to forget why they belong to that civilization in the first place. No longer are they unified in comfort against the darkness. No longer can their sluggish rituals adapt themselves to the rapid shifts of culture that are inherent to such a massive population of people. Their temporary bridge is falling apart, and when it does- the world that they built on top of that bridge will go down right behind it.


4.Local shifts in culture and science are always predicated by effective rituals that have been crafted by an individual for personal use.

One day, a scientist walks out of his laboratory after 40 long days and 40 long nights of research- and proclaims that he has discovered a theory which may very well describe mans fate after death.

But the people are so involved with their ancient ritualistic system that they ignore the scientist because their static principles cannot react quickly enough to adapt. Because of this, they are unable to further separate themselves from the malevolent universal order which their ritual was created to protect them against in the first place.