Moments That We Save painting by Nolan Winkler
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 enraged at us for daring to be
ourselves and they will stop at
nothing to try to kill us.
Several times during the movie we take breaks from being
pursued by the men who want to kill us, and we perform
for audiences of women and children and unusual men
who are not enraged by us being ourselves. I play
piano, you play harp, my brother strums a
ukulele, and we sing songs in three-part
harmony. We read poems of mystery,
tell funny stories about unlikely
tender-hearted heroes, and
paint intriguing pictures of
a 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 a hood. We are sentenced to death and
are about to be executed when all the women and
children and unusual men we’ve met along our
way rise up to save us. And in the fabulous
song and dance finale, the men who
wanted to kill us for being
ourselves wake from their
trances and see that
they are us.
Todd Walton