Interns/Barthelme

"Interns." Easily one of my favorite sketches of ours, the SPR era, it must have been Summer of '02 or '03, and SY and CA were excellent in their insolence. "We're not criminals!" That we had interns, still ridiculous. I'm guessing we were the only sketch group in NYC doing adaptations of Donald Barthelme, which is probably why we're no longer working. JWW was inspired, as always, in his editing and scoring, picking one of my favorite Kinks' songs and would-be personal anthem to raise the level of the piece.

I hope you take as much pleasure from it as I do.

The inspiration for this sketch is available in the Barthelme collection 40 Stories, which you should buy and read. If you don't have the inclination, it has been reprinted here. It is short, funny, and begins as follows:

The first thing the baby did wrong was to tear pages out of her books. So we made a rule that each time she tore a page out of a book she had to stay alone in her room for four hours, behind the closed door. She was tearing out about a page a day, in the beginning, and the rule worked fairly well, although the crying and screaming from behind the closed door were unnerving. We reasoned that that was the price you had to pay, or part of the price you had to pay. But then as her grip improved she got to tearing out two pages at a time, which meant eight hours alone in her room, behind the closed door, which just doubled the annoyance for everybody. But she wouldn't quit doing it. And then as time went on we began getting days when she tore out three or four pages, which put her alone in her room for as much as sixteen hours at a stretch, interfering with normal feeding and worrying my wife. But I felt that if you made a rule you had to stick to it, had to be consistent, otherwise they get the wrong idea. She was about fourteen months old or fifteen months old at that point. Often, of course, she'd go to sleep, after an hour or so of yelling, that was a mercy. Her room was very nice, with a nice wooden rocking horse and practically a hundred dolls and stuffed animals. Lots of things to do in that room if you used your time wisely, puzzles and things. Unfortunately sometimes when we opened the door we'd find that she'd torn more pages out of more books while she was inside, and these pages had to be added to the total, in fairness.

The baby's name was Born Dancin'. We gave the baby some of our wine, red, whites and blue, and spoke seriously to her. But it didn't do any good.

You should read it, and if you like it, you should read more Barthelme.