Today on WILLIAMSON’S WAY, Elvis Presley and Steve Martin are in our studio to make a commercial, and so are the M*A*S*H characters Hawkeye Pierce and Sidney Friedman! Plus! The surreal storytelling continues. Walter bares (almost) all to his boss Will. Meanwhile, has Norman Light gone missing? Brought to you by our sponsors Spot Blot Spot, Tech Five Home Computer Repair, and Biggole Toasters.
Show Excerpt: The New Norm L
Norman Light went home. But not to Riverview.
This was a different home, a handsome two-storey house in the Tudor style, first built around 1979 in Winnipeg’s Tuxedo district. October in Winnipeg was always dodgy, but this overcast, damp chilly day might have been Hawaii so far as our hero was concerned. This was his childhood home, after the Lights moved from Southdale, and it was now completely rebuilt from the fire. It was rebuilt from memory, so long ago, where back in the uncomplicated late 1980s Norman could watch movies, listen to music, and read books, all from the white whicker chair in his bedroom in the second storey front window, on the right-hand side.
Norman wanted to go back, to just that moment, just before the intrusion, before his folks died, to the quiet life he knew, before everything changed.
He got what he wanted (other than his folks).
And so…What next?
The life that he knew - that is, after he became the world’s greatest impersonator – the flash of photography bulbs (but not for him), the shouts of “Quiet on the set!” and a cast and crew of thousands, that life now gave way to a crackling of a fireplace and through grunting people distributing blue Rubbermaid bins to various rooms in a two-storey house. Oh, he still did the odd morphing, say, to Arnold Schwarzenegger, to help with the lifting, and he in fact seemed serene with this arrangement. So much so that a total of 14 years passed in this tranquil manner. It was now 2017. One day, May Long took what years ago was Norman Light’s mother’s usual seat on the couch.
The only other person in the house was Klaus Kohl, who was now Norman’s personal assistant. Klaus lived on site and had a book-lined office directly beneath Norman’s bedroom.
Norman stood in his old bedroom looking out onto the street. Or he would have done, if the trees hadn’t, in his growing to a man, now grown and blocked most of the view. Even standing out on the balcony in front of his window – accessible by a side door that led through his parents’ old bedroom, the trees still blocked the view. On his dresser he had each of the books and movies and CDs he was currently into. The idea was to read one page a day of each of the books, shifting their position, moving the first one on the extreme left to the extreme right and down. And then…figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his life. At least he wasn’t alone. There was his audience, looking up at him.
No, that’s wrong. He was their audience. He was receiving them, albeit one by one, and shuffling them down, so, no, not an audience, not in the traditional sense then, not in the one by one.
Rather, it was as if his display of books was an old television set and he was getting up to change the channels. But NOT, however, in the careless manner of one who didn’t care what he watched and was in fact missing relevant bits of information within the act of switching.
No, the freedom of retirement had the effect of imposing a strangely insistent structure and solitude on how the traditionally stressed, put-upon Norman Light now conducted his life: those books in this order, and, if he even did venture out of the house, it was merely to get groceries, or get a haircut, or to see the doctor or the dentist. He never met anyone, and he didn’t want to. He’d done it. All.
After all, he’d come from a rarified race, one of entertainment scientists, and he saw no reason not to carry on their work here on Earth, reading light books, watching movies and listening to CDs. His best friends had become Amazon and EBay, through which he spent the considerable money he’d had socked away to replenish his library of light popular culture.
He’d spent his youth trying to impress everyone else, by…being everyone else, and had done so in spectacular fashion. It should stand to reason, then, that having given the world this extraordinary gift, he’d now EARNED the right to anonymity as The New Norm L. With the tall, albeit crouching, Klaus Kohl to keep the world at bay, and with May Long to redecorate Norman’s childhood home to the exact specifications of his memory, Norman Light’s world would, for all intents and purposes, be Undocumented from now on, as he had nothing more he needed to give
And yet… Much as he would have LIKED to return, completely undisturbed, to the esteemed life of his ancestors and ”just” read books, watch movies and listen to music, ad infinitum, there was that unavoidable (though to his mind, tiny) detail of now living on Earth rather than his old planet.
It turned out that even the biggest star in the world (past tense) could have a partner who could pull a book out of his hands, turn off a reading light, and turn off a TV and a CD player, which is what May did. Norman swiveled his legs off the hassock in front of him in surprise as May proceeded to squat down on same hassock, facing him.
“Norm… You’re not living.”
“What, I’ve died?
“No, I mean…”
“And nothing’s changed. Good! So, this IS heaven. I thought so! I love you, May. Thanks for sticking by me. Now, harrumph, if I could just get back to my stuff…” May refused to hand over the book.
“Noooo. Norman, when I say you’re not living I mean you’re alive but dead inside.”
Norman stared at her. “What, like a zombie? Well I admit I respect George Romero and all, but honestly zombie movies aren’t my favourites.”
“I MEAN, you’re wasting away. You once had that talent, being able to become anybody, the whole world admiring you…”
“Oh. Yeah, yeah,” interrupted Norman, with an unmistakably bitter impatience, “Admiring me only because I could become all of THEM, the whole world!”
“Right, and…”
“You’re only talking about the worst time of my life! Having to literally turn myself inside out JUST to be liked by other people! You’re talking about a time that made me miserable!”
“Right, AND it’s ENABLED YOU to live this cushy retirement!”
A pause.
“Well…what if it has? What’s it to you?? If I remember right, you didn’t like my being away from home all the time.”
May leaned back on the hassock, accepting this.
“Yeah. All right, I admit that, I didn’t.”
“So, why is it you want to now ruin the good life that we WORKED to HAVE?”
“It’s your complete indifference to the outside world.”
“Ah yes…that same outside world I’ve spent the better part of my life entertaining? THAT world? We’re going in circles, May.”
“If you would let me finish…”
“It stands to reason, May, that a celebrity impersonator, even a retired one, is still gonna immerse himself in the world, or worlds, of the celebrities he loves. I can never imagine a time when I didn’t do that…”
“All right, Norman! You don’t have to sell it to me, I just think that what you’re not fully grasping here is HOW the choice you’ve made LOOKS to us. How it LOOKS to everyone else.”
Norman fixed her with a rare, cold look.
“It LOOKS like someone gave you and Klaus a very good life.”
May was unbowed.
“With a boring legend?
“Excuse me…BORING??”
“What makes you think we couldn’t be happy without you?”
Norman Light felt the chilling sensation of a new emotion: hilarity and outrage, somehow together?? Well, why not more changes, eh! Still…
“HOW is it that a man who once regaled the WORLD with his full-body celebrity impersonations is suddenly boring?” he asked.
May’s face remained an impassive mask.
“Oh, home video, YouTube, streaming…”
“But…”
“Any number of PRESENT-DAY inventions that bring the REAL celebrities within our daily grasp, any hour of any day.”
Norman was silent. May figured this would silence him, and while she continued to lower the boom, it was rather gentle as booms go. She’d sensed correctly that she’d gotten through to him, even if it hurt.
“Time…. Time and technology, in particular, has favoured the originals and not the knock-offs. It had to, right? You do see that, don’t you Norman? It may have been thrilling at one time to be in the presence of a master impressionist, but, if a push of a button gets the real deal in front of whomever, whenever, wherever, you…become unnecessary. Also, you may not be aware of it, but the money has dwindled. Me and Klaus have become entertainment scientists, only we don’t care for it!”
Norman was too hurt to take that last bit in. “But…I like people,” he pouted. Then, more to himself than her, “I like to be liked. I liked powerful people…that’s why I imitated them…”
“…To be liked,” nodded May, finishing the sentence for him, “only this VCR aspect of you is just this passive container of other people, it has nothing to do with affection for anybody else. It’s just you going to extremes, to fill a void…”
Angry tears welled in Norman’s eyes. “I DO TOO love people! …And this is how I’m gonna help ‘em!” From out of nowhere he passed to May an application form for something called the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival.
“I’m going to give back to the people; share who I really am, to help with them with their own lives!”
And so, on July 16, 2017, Norman Light spoke to a sell-out crowd at Winnipeg’s Planetarium Auditorium. As himself, to share everything he’d learned now that he had his life completely straightened out. THIS time there would be no cop-out, no “funny tricks”, just well and truly…The New Norm L.
The lights dimmed. A single spotlight appeared on the microphone and stand at centre stage. Norman Light approached the spot from the wings, to warm nostalgic applause. This did indeed seem to be the moment his fans had been waiting for…
Featuring: “Spot Blot Spot Spot”, “Storytelling – Just Add Walter, Part 8”, “Tech Five Home Computer Repair Spot”, “Biggole Toasters Spot”, “Storytelling – The New Norm L, Part 7”.
