(A man and a woman are sitting on a brown leather sofa, he on the left and she on the right. They are in front of the audience. He dresses in black and wears a lion mask. She wears a green shirt and a blue skirt and wears a HARE mask. The back wall is decorated with record covers of several years.)
LION: Are you finally going to confess to her?
HARE: (She crosses her feet and hands.) I don't know.
LION: You'll have to tell her.
HARE: Don't make me dizzy about it. I'm sick . Everything has its time. It's like baking a cake, it needs its baking time. You can't take it out early because it will crumble. You have to wait for the right moment, no more and no less.
LION: There are times when it is necessary to take a step forward because the situation is screaming for it.
(HARE gets up and stays silent watching the album covers.)
HARE: Do you know what Patti Smith's first album was?
(Pause.)
HARE: There's the cover of that album. It's called Horses. An album that she recorded in 1975 and that marked an era. The queen of Punk. Now Patti is Mrs. Smith. A sweet seventy-one year old woman who reads the Bible and is only interested in her family and poetry.
LION: (Uncomfortable.) I don't know what you mean by that. I don't give a shit about Patti Smith and Mrs. Smith and Punk shit. I only care about today and a little bit about tomorrow.
(She sits to his left. Under the cover of Horses.)
HARE: I mean that the life we're living today will have nothing to do with the life we're going to live forty years from now. Many times we think that we are one way and one morning we wake up being another, without recognizing ourselves in the mirror.
LION: You don't need to be very smart for that. I just want to know when you are going to take the step. It's not very complicated to answer that question.
HARE: I will do it tonight.
LION: (Surprised.) Tonight?
HARE: Yes, tonight. She will come to the party. Although she doesn't know I'll be around. I told her I couldn't come, that I had a last-minute job complicated.
LION: Why didn't you tell me anything?
(HARE stands up and looks at the cover of Patti Smith's Horses.)
HARE: It's funny how your life changes. One day you're the queen of Punk and you live a wild and dissolute life and then, with time, you take off the studs, the ridges, the greñas and you become a completely different person. The Queen of the Holy Bible.
LION: Can you answer me?
HARE: Yes, life changes you. Yesterday a caterpillar, today a chrysalis and tomorrow a butterfly.
LION: (Angry.) Fuck, leave the fucking philosophy and answer my question! Why the hell didn't you tell me anything?
(HARE sits on Leon's right and crosses his legs. She puts his hand on her knee and gives her two touches.)
HARE: Calm down. I didn't tell you anything because I thought about it this afternoon. Then I went to buy the masks and called her. You know the rest.
LION: Why did you tell her you weren't coming?
HARE: I want to observe her for the last time. See how she acts without me in front of her. Maybe I'm looking for a reason, a justification. I don't know. She will come with a Cacatua mask. We bought ourselves two similar masks for this feast. One with a red beak and the other with a blue beak.
LION: How do you think she'll take it when you tell her?
HARE: I don't know. I would take it very badly. I'd grab her by the hair and slap her a few times. If it's hard to digest being left, it's even harder to be left for a person of the opposite sex. It's an explosive cocktail wherever you take it.
LION: It's that your transformation is not normal.
HARE: I recognize it, but you know: caterpillar, chrysalis and butterfly. We can't fight against internal transformations. We have to accept them because if we don't, we go crazy and we would be hypocrites. (Pause.) I don't want to go crazy, let alone be a hypocrite. I respect her a lot to continue with this farce.
LION: It's going to be a good one. You know that, don't you?
HARE: Yes, I know, but I'm ready. I've been training since I slept with you. That's when I knew my story with her was over.
Image source: Pixabay
