Happy Birthday, Wanda June by Kurt Vonnegut (read out loud books .txt) 📕

But you didn't know him, and neither did I. How's your asthma?

PAUL

Don't worry about it.

WOODLY

How's the fungus around your thumbnail?

PAUL

(concealing the thumb) It's fine!

WOODLY

It's jungle rot! This room is making everybody sick! This is your family doctor speaking now. (unrolling the poster) Here--I brought you something else to hang on your wall, for the sake of variety.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE

PENELOPE

(reading)

"War is not healthy for children and other living things." How lovely.

WOODLY

No doubt Paul thinks it stinks. Lion doorbell roars.

WOODLY

I hate that thing.

PAUL

(going to the door) Keeps fairies away!

He admits HERB SHUTTLE, who carries an Electrolux vacuum cleaner.

SHUTTLE

(to PAUL

affectionately,

touching him)

Hi kid.

(seeing WOODLY)

Would you look what the car dragged in.

WOODLY

I'm glad you brought your vacuum cleaner.

SHUTTLE

Is that a fact?

WOODLY

That maid just quit. The place is a mess. You can start in the master bedroom.

PENELOPE

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE

SHUTTLE

He's not anybody to tell somebody else what to do in a master bedroom.

PENELOPE

I'll get ready, Herb. I didn't expect you this soon.

(to all)

Please--won't everybody be nice to everybody else while I'm gone? All freeze, except for PENELOPE, who comes forward to address the audience. Lights on set fade as spotlight comes on.

PENELOPE

Most men shunned me--even when I nearly swooned for want of love. I might as well have been girdled in a chastity belt. My chastity belt was not made of iron and chains and chickenwire, but of Harold's lethal reputation.

SHUTTLE comes into the spotlight.

SHUTTLE

I keep having this nightmare--that he catches us.

PENELOPE

Doing what?

SHUTTLE

He'd kill me. He'd be right to kill me, too--the kind of guy he is.

PENELOPE

Or was. We haven't done anything wrong, you know.

SHUTTLE

He'd assume we had.

PENELOPE

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE

That's something I suppose.

SHUTTLE

All through the day I'm so confident. That's why I'm such a good salesman, you know? I have confidence, and I look like I have confidence, and that gives other people confidence. People laugh sometimes when they find out I'm a vacuum cleaner salesman. They stop laughing, though, when they find out I made forty-three thousand dollars last year. I've got six other salesmen working under me, and what they all plug into is my confidence. That's what charges them up.

PENELOPE

I'm glad.

SHUTTLE

I was captain of the wrestling team at Lehigh University.

PENELOPE

I know.

SHUTTLE

If you want to wrestle, you got Lehigh. If you want to play tennis, you go to Vanderbilt.

PENELOPE

I don't want to go to Vanderbilt.

SHUTTLE

You don't wrestle if you don't have supreme confidence, and I wrestled. But when I get with you, and I say to myself, "My God--here I am with the wife of Harold Ryan, one of the great heroes of all time--" file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ku...egut%20-%20Happy%20Birthday%20Wanda-June.htm (11 of 143) [10/16/2004 4:36:52 PM]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE

Pause.

PENELOPE

Yes?

SHUTTLE

Something happens to my confidence.

PENELOPE

(to the audience)

This conversation took place, incidentally, about three months before Harold was declared legally dead.

SHUTTLE

When Harold is definitely out of the picture, Penelope, when I don't have to worry about doing him wrong or you wrong or Paul wrong. I'm going to ask you to be my wife.

PENELOPE

I'm touched.

SHUTTLE

That's when I'll get my confidence back.

PENELOPE

I see.

SHUTTLE

If you'll pardon the expression, that's when you'll see the fur and feathers fly. Good night.

PENELOPE

Good night.

Blackout.

SCENE TWO

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE

SHUTTLE and WOODLY argue in pitch darkness, with PAUL

listening, and lights come up gradually to full on the living room the same evening.

SHUTTLE

You've got to fight from time to time.

WOODLY

Not true.

SHUTTLE

Or get eaten alive.

WOODLY

That's not true either--or needn't be, unless we make it true.

SHUTTLE

Phooey.

WOODLY

Which we do. But we can stop doing that.

The lights are full. SHUTTLE and WOODLY are bored with each other, WOODLY looks out the window, speaks to an imaginary listener who has more brains than SHUTTLE. PAUL hates them both, but prefers SHUTTLE's noisy manliness.

WOODLY

We simply stop doing that--dropping things on each other, eating each other alive.

SHUTTLE

(calling)

Penelope! We're late!

PENELOPE

(off, in master

bedroom suite)

Coming.

SHUTTLE

(to PAUL)

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Women are always late. You'll find out.

WOODLY

(thoughtfully)

The late Mrs. Harold Ryan.

SHUTTLE

I'm sick of this argument. I just have one more thing to say: If you elect a President, you support him, no matter what he does. That's the only way you can have a country!

WOODLY

It's the planet that's in ghastly trouble now and all our brothers and sisters thereon.

SHUTTLE

None of my relatives are Chinese Communists. Speak for yourself.

WOODLY

Chinese maniacs and Russian maniacs and American maniacs and French maniacs and British maniacs have turned this lovely, moist, nourishing blue-green ball into a doomsday device. Let a radar set and a computer mistake a hawk or a meteor for a missile, and that's the end of mankind.

SHUTTLE

You can believe that if you want. I talk to guys like you, and I want to commit suicide.

(to PAUL)

You get that weight-lifting set I sent you?

PAUL

It came yesterday. I haven't file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ku...egut%20-%20Happy%20Birthday%20Wanda-June.htm (14 of 143) [10/16/2004 4:36:52 PM]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE

opened it yet.

WOODLY

(musingly, attempting to find the idea

acceptable, even

funny, in a way)

Maybe it's supposed to end now. Maybe God wouldn't have it any other way.

SHUTTLE

(to PAUL)

Start with the smallest weights. Every week add a pound or two.

WOODLY

Maybe God has let everybody who ever lived be reborn--so he or she can see how it ends. Even Pithecanthropus erectus and Australopithecus and Sinanthropus pekensis and the Neanderthalers are back on Earth--to see how it ends. They're all on Times Square--making change for peepshows. Or recruiting Marines.

SHUTTLE

(to PAUL)

You ever hear the story about the boy who carried a calf around the barn every day?

WOODLY

He died of