I Will Play Chico
a cinematic poem
I want to make a movie, a modern variant of the Marx Brothers.
My brother will play Groucho, you will play Harpo, and I will
play Chico. The movie is a classic comedy mystery chase love
story. We race around being ourselves in myriad situations—
basketball games, delicatessens, hardware stores, museums
pizza parlors, schools, post offices, gas stations, taquerias,
coffee houses, traffic jams, ice cream parlors, prisons,
art galleries, trains, psychotherapists’ offices, hotels
noodle joints, laundromats, sporting goods stores,
bistros, police stations, zoos, churches, houses,
hotels, corporate headquarters, jungles—
and everywhere we go we encounter
men who are so outraged by our
being ourselves they will stop
at nothing to try to kill us.
Now and then during the movie we take time out from being
pursued by these outraged men to perform for gleeful
audiences of women and children and a few unusual
men who are not enraged by our being ourselves;
and during these breaks in the chase, I play
the piano, you play the harp, and my
brother strums a ukulele. We read
poems, sing soulful songs, tell
funny, poignant stories, and
paint lovely pictures of a
tender new society free
of cruelty and jealousy.
In the end we are captured and jailed and charged with
the crime of being ourselves. The trial takes place in a
spooky courtroom presided over by a judge wearing
a mask and hood. We are sentenced to death and
are about to be executed when all the women
and children and a few unusual men we’ve
met along our way rise up to save us.
And in a fabulous song and dance
finale, the men who wanted to kill
us for being ourselves wake from
their trances and understand
that without us they would
have nothing to hope for.
Todd Walton