Saturday, January 15, 2011

Penelope Smythe Pushes Rewind

Image borrowed from Yahoo


Penelope Smythe pushes rewind


Penelope Smythe,
respectable lady of the parish,
spends time in her mind,
reliving old scenes of her life and playing
a little 'Directors Cut' game of her own,
deleting and replacing scenes from her life.

In the scene in a bar at sunset
in Naples fifty years ago,
with her mother,
sipping tea with white gloved hands,
a parasol poised by her table, like a weapon..
she likes to change the scene, just a tad.

Penelope presses rewind in her remembered scene....

The waiter offers tea to the two stiff-backed ladies.

Penelope Smythe, aged seventeen
and pure and demure,
refuses the tea and orders..
..a cocktail...
vodka based....
with a silly umbrella in it...

How vulgar!...Mother whispers....

Make it a double!
Penelope shouts to the re-imagined waiter...

When her mother points out the musicians
setting up their band and their music sheets
for the evening and says:

'Keep away from the musicians, dear'..

Penelope says:

'What's that you say, Mother?
Keep away from the musicians.......

Where exactly are they?....

Just so I know which ones exactly to avoid...
I know I have a reputation to uphold, Mother.....
Oh, I see them now....Italian musicians,
Oh, I know, Mother,
of course I prefer Walter at home....
and his fascinating hobbies...
but the music is starting, Mother.....
let's just have some champagne...
no-one here knows us.....it is good, isn't it?
bubbly? A magic potion?... I agree...
have a bottle, Mother...'

And in the new scene, Penelope sings the blues
and boozes and carouses with the bad Italian boys.....
She lies on the piano drinking champagne
from a bottle and breaks peoples hearts
with the absolute raw beauty of her voice......
and sings a duet with the sad-eyed Italian boy
from the hills and their voices
fit so perfectly together.....
she spends the next fifty years wondering...
if she was not Penelope Smythe...
white-gloved and stiff-backed
and from a family of standing....
with good old Walter waiting at home
to place a family heirloom
of a ring on her finger....
a dead woman's ring...
Penelope wonders if she and her Italian boy
could have lived in a stone cottage
on a hill over a bay....
and sing a duet every day.......

It could kill a woman thinking like that !

Poor old Penelope Smythe,
respectable lady of the parish...

Brigid O'Connor

Posted over on her site Sort Of Writing
Listed as #53 over on Magpie Tales 48

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