Screwball Dialogue

by Dan Mooney    

     I hopped on the L train westbound the other night, headed over to 8th avenue.  Soon after I got on, I heard a woman's calm yet impassioned and projecting voice resound through the subway car.  Speaking with an accent which may or may not have been Jamaican, she was instructing her makeshift congregation, i.e. anyone on the train who was or wasn't listening, on the glory of God and the benefit of prayer, and was basically wishing us all well.
     Which I didn't mind. It might have intruded on our right to silence and not to have ideology forced down our gullets, but there are worse things to hear on a subway ride.
     The train arrives at Union Square and another lady, dressed slightly more shabbily, gets on. When the train starts moving, and the bustle has slowed and quieted, the first lady's voice once again fills the air.
     1: "You must pray if you want to be healed."
     At which point the second lady starts yelling back at her.
     2: "The Church is a greedy, self-centered organization..."
     And then their comments start overlapping:
     1: "There is good in the world..."
     2: "...all about money and power, they don't give a shit about women..."
     1: "...teach your children to be faithful..."
     2: "...some priests molest children..."
     Quite a show. It's style wouldn't have been out of place in a Howard Hawks movie from the 1930's, although Cary Grant's banter had less theological implication. In the end, there is no resolution to their argument, just a dovetailing of their diametrically opposed and totally complementary views.
     At Sixth Avenue, the first lady gets off the train.  So the second, anti-religion lady has the ears of the train all to herself.  For the length of one more subway stop, she has the soapbox, and the associated privilege to rant about how she's homeless, that the government took her musical instruments away, that organized religion can't save her.  Poignant.
     By the end of my trip, I had seen a fifteen-minute one-act play illustrating and personifying the arguments for and against organized religion, as well as a demonstration of the trend from a religious to a secular society. Not bad for two bucks.
       

Dan Mooney lives in Astoria, Queens. He received an M.A. in English from Fordham University and is currently working on his first novel.