The Marquis’ Intimate Diary

SUNDAY, 13 FEBRUARY, 2000, PHILADELPHIA
In the bull’s-eye of Philadelphia, Rittenhouse Square in the snow at dusk is an ampitheatre. In the summer, the trees in the park — one healthy square block — draw the curtains and the square becomes a Green Room, in all senses of the term. But in the winter when the trees draw back their velvet curtains, the events on the square appear as on a stage. The audience members are the tall buildings surrounding the square, gazing down with keen interest as the plot unfolds, like the aristocracy in their season box seats high, high above the stage.

The curved pathways shoot out quaquaversally from the stone statuary in the center of the park. Benches flock the walkways. Those sitting in benches kick the snow and slush absently on the ground. Dog-walkers stop to exchange words, probably about the pedigrees of their companions. Full-legth fur coats are not taboo here. Neither, it appears, are berets.

The sky hums with a throbbing cobalt. The audience — those edifices and façades — are black silhouettes as night jams her crowbar into day and dusk is the bloody-blue mêlée resultant.

Benches and statues become misty phantoms. Only the untouched snowy lawns eminate light — an electric veiny white reflecting the sky, like white cotton under a blacklight.

The pedestrians are easy with each other. Even an occasional smile is passed between strangers. So, so very unlike New York.

Rittenhouse Square is perhaps one of the last major urban parks where I can sit on a bench with my ridiculously pricey PowerBook as night approaches and not worry about crack fiends or other street peasantry braining me for my prize.

On a February evening on the Square, the Past and the Future meet, check each other out, and book it to the nearest sleazy motel for some red-hot timeline action.



Hello. Thank you for letting me exercise my Descriptive Passage muscles. They are sore now, but it is a healthy throbbing in the soreness.

If this were one of my stories, I would further describe the scene as our Hero enters the park. He is walking across town to return his 3-for-2 videos, all porn: “Down on the Farm”, “Itty Bitty Bang Bang”, and “The Boys of Dar Es Salaam”. His progress would be interrupted by a low moaning from behind a bush. Alarmed, he would explore the source of the noise to find a woman lying bleeding on the ground, sebaceous crimson blood flowing and freezing against the virginal snow in crystal rivulets.

“It’s not … too … late,” she would sputter and die.

The man would glance about hastily looking for suspects. He would see a man wheeling a cello away hastily, a woman popping toffees into her mouth with an obsessive compulsion, and a small child playing with a smoking gun.

Our Hero would immediately take off after the man with the cello.

Eventually, this story would be bought out for film rights. I would insist that the soundtrack for this scene be Saint-Saëns’s “Danse Macabre”. Either that or “Grooving in Green” by the March Violets, depending upon if the production team behind the film were Merchant/Ivory or Alex Cox.

The man would be played by Campbell Scott. The woman in the snow, Jessica Lange. Celloman is Christopher Walken while the small child is Gary Coleman. My character, the Shakespearean narrator who, for his presence on-screen, is not noticed by the players, would be portrayed by Agnes Moorehead. I understand she is deceased, but I am told I may write my own ticket, so that is what I want, and that is what I will have.

But I shan’t write this story. The treatment has been completed, and I grow bored with things once the treatment is done.

Perhaps instead I will simply write a book of treatments, claiming 50% royalties if someone else wants to develop them into novels, plays or TV movies o’ the week on the Lifetime Women-in-Peril channel.

Taxi!