Evelyn Dunbar & Other Comedies

By Josie Peterson

This book is about satire of life from a female point of view and consists of slice-of-life episodes from fantasy to day-to-day humdrum life with social realism mixed in.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Josie Peterson
• Release date: Mar 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224364770

Josie Peterson

I am a writer and actress who has performed in New York and Los Angeles with professional and workshop productions of my stage plays in Manhattan. I write across multiple genres including dark humor, tragedy, and political drama. I've been writing steadily for the past 20 years and will continue to write novels and adaptations of classical works in the years to come. My work tends toward the experimental side of art and always includes strong and simple humanitarian voices and points of view, no matter what genre I'm writing in. I love being involved in bringing my work to the public and seeing fellow actors interpret my material, along with performing some of it myself every now and then. I invite readers to visit my website at https://www.josiepeterson.net for information about my catalogue, editorial reviews, book awards, and more. Details about my film and television credits are located on IMDb at https://www.pro.imdb.com/JosiePeterson

Book preview

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Cockney Polly 

M. Smith Mularky 

Evil Baby Jane and Her Mother 

Life As A Roman Catholic 

Evelyn Dunbar 

The Characters

Cockney Polly, a broken down waitress

M. Smith Mularky, a slow-witted disc jockey

Evil Baby Jane/Her Mother, a clever seven-year-old/her very attractive soulless mother

Life as a Roman Catholic, a middle-aged Italian American

Evelyn Dunbar, a screen siren

COCKNEY POLLY the beleaguered waitress

Dinnertime on a cold winter evening in a crowded East Coast Mafia- affiliated restaurant around the year 2005. Polly enters. She carries a tray, along with her pad to take food orders. She speaks in a modified east London accent. The stage is bare except for a few chairs.

POLLY.  Hello Sir...Who am I? Polly. My name’s Polly—I’m your waitress. I know I don’t look too good, but I do get the job done every now and then, and I’ll make sure you get everything you need to have a real, real, nice dinner...Where’s young & pretty Angelina? She’s outside smokin’ a cigarette because she’s a magna cum laude college graduate with a degree in English, and she doesn’t give a shit. (looking left) Excuse me, Sir. I have to pick up that french fry on the floor. (She squats and scans her hand around on the floor, locates the culprit and sticks it into her apron.) Management told us ...(rising with help from the imaginary customer)... that in addition to setting up before patrons come—and that means killin’ yourself doing 10,000 or so odd jobs in half the time they should take—we now have to make sure the floor is cleaned up since they don’t want to pay for vacuuming each night after closing.... What’s that? What about Righty? Oh, she might be in the walk-in checking up on the Romano cheese. Making sure it’s cold and hard. Or, she could be countin’ the lemons I cut before my shift to make sure there’s all 110 of them in the wooden bowls. Because she’s developed an obsession with lemons from too many years of waitressing. (turning) Sir, can I get you a Jim Beam so you can get shit faced before your dinner arrives? It takes 45 minutes to cook your boned chicken, I’m told. We’re damn lucky I’d say, that we don’t have to raise the chickens ourselves, before the shift begins....(sitting) Big & Stiff Barbara, our other elderly waitress right after Lefty, got her hand caught in the freezer while she was chopping all the ice off the ice cream. She nearly broke her wrist the bucket was in there so cold...! But don’t worry about it. We held her wrist under water and it healed a bit.  Now she can’t pick anything up in her hand too good...If a waitress drops something, anything, she’s carrying, don’t worry, it will be returned to your plate just before we serve. (turning) Sir, can I offer you some soggy toast and please do not be concerned with the breadbasket. If the person at your neighboring table doesn’t eat his, it will go back somewhere along the line into your basket. (She moves to another table) Sir, would you like your Volcanic Chicken Pompeii sandwich without bread and no potatoes, or with spaghetti or a salad, or the sandwich with bread and french-fries, or without bread and baked potato with salad, or would you like it without bread and no salad, but with croquette potatoes and no spaghetti? Did you understand me Sir...? Wait, that’s just the first part. Within your Volcanic Chicken you may have marinara sauce or meat sauce, or marinara with meat, but the Pompeii section of it can be composed of sweet marinara without the beef flavoring, or it can be the non-sweet variety, and with the meat flavor in the middle. None of it will come with a tossed salad, if you order the chicken on the bone. Remember, if there’s bone, you will not eat a tossed. Even if there’s bread. But I always argue with the kitchen, why even have the bone if there is any indication you will be serving the sandwich on the bread. You would like your appetizer now...? That would make my life much more simple and uncomplicated...but we can’t. No, no, no. We only do all the food at once. We’ve eliminated the entire concept of serving an appetizer before the main course even though eight to ten of them are available on the menu. Don’t believe what you read on a menu, ever. The menu is just there in your hands to make things look good. But most of it could be all lies. See, there’s one dish over there in the pork n’ veal section that just doesn’t exist....(distracted) excuse me. I’ve got to pick up another goddamn french fry (bending over