Don't Jump, Pt. 1.

What I did for internship. Tell me if you'd like to keep on reading/give me some feedback, plz.

Honor, a woman in her early thirties, is standing on raised platform (the roof of the building), looking down. As the lights go up, a muffled crowd can be heard below, in a general state of panic. One woman shouts, don't jump. Honor rolls her head around on her neck, basking in it.

John (an average-looking man in his mid-forties, very middle-management, with a glazed, recited look and feel to everything he says and does) enters from upstage right, like he's just come up onto the roof.

JOHN

Excuse me.

Honor jumps, puts her hand to her chest, a pantomime of what frightened should be.

HONOR

God. You scared me.

JOHN

Ah. Yeah, that probably wasn't a great idea...

They stare at each other awkwardly for a moment. John coughs.

JOHN (CONT'D)

Um, ma'am, I'm going to have to ask you to get down from the ledge there. It's against building protocol for non-security employees to be up on the roof like that. So if you could just...

HONOR

Are you joking?

JOHN

No, those are the rules.

HONOR

I know those are the rules. Those are the rules everywhere. I don't care about the rules. I'm going to jump.

This had honestly not occurred to John before now. He is mildly surprised to receive this news.

JOHN

Oh. Huh. That's...don't do that.

HONOR

(theatrical)

If you've come here to stop me, you can save your breath. I'm not going to listen.

JOHN

Well, it's probably not all that--

HONOR

There's nothing you can say. My mind is made up.

JOHN

You could at least hear me out. Common courtesy being what it is.

HONOR

Why bother? I already know what you're going to say. It's just not worth it anymore. Every day is a worthless circle. Get up, brush my teeth, take a shower, go to work, get home, go to sleep, rinse, repeat. Life is not worth living.

JOHN

Then jump.

HONOR

...excuse me?

JOHN

Listen, don't take this the wrong way, but you're kind of pissing me off right now.

HONOR

I'm what?!

JOHN

You think that everyone who wears a tie and drinks coffee out of a 'Life's a Beach' mug doesn't think strikingly similar things about all of their strikingly similar lives? What the hell makes you so special? Hmm? That you get to stand up here and bitch about it to everyone? That you get to quit instead of sucking it up and typing up expense reports like the rest of us? If you want to jump, go ahead and jump. Who am I to stop you?

HONOR

(knocked off balance by his words, to herself)

But...well. This is interesting. A new technique, or something? It must be. I've never heard anything like that before.

JOHN

Before? Like you've been in this situation before?

Honor laughs awkwardly.

Dear Lady Gaga,

I think you're pretty cool. Okay? I really do. I admit that when I saw your first music video, I sort of wanted to take something very pointy to your skull, because like we need another slutty blond girl singing about how easy it is to get into her sparkly spandex American Apparel hot pants when she's drunk. But once you busted out the nipple fireworks and killed Alexander Skarsgard, I went over to the dark side. Because, let's face it, no one can pull off Muppet genocide like you do.

But when you make me go through 20 minutes of scantily clad backup dancers with bowl cuts violating each other and cigarette sunglasses and chunks of meat wrapped in barbed wire and no eyebrows and American Flag jumpsuits and rosary-eating nuns in red rubber habits and going back to normal for five seconds only to bust out a machine gun bra in the next shot and lesbian prisons and your entire face randomly dissolving and scaring the shit out of me all for no ostensible reason (considering that none of that has anything AT ALL to do with what you are talking about), only for me to excuse everything once you start singing and get Allejandro stuck in my head? NOT COOL, GAGA. REALLY NOT COOL AT ALL.



P.S. Do me.