"Howard Waldrop - Winter Quarters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

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It wasn't an evening, it was more like fourteen or fifteen minutes.
 It wasn't sorcery, but it was transformative: it transformed him right out of college. To say that it wasn't
well received is bending the language.
Jones 112 was the big lecture hall with multimedia capabilities, and when we got there, props and stuff
littered the raised lecture platform. Some pipes, a fire extinguisher, a low platform raised about a meter
off the ground on two-by-four legs; some big pieces of window glass. In true Brechtian fashion prop men
sat on the stage playing cards.
By seven the place was packed, SRO.
The lights went down; there were three thumps on the floor, and lights came back up.
Out came a Chaplin-mustached Arnaud in a modified SA uniform. He wore a silk top-hat with a big
silver swastika on the front. He wore a cloak fashioned after one of the ones the Nazis were going to
make all truck drivers wear, back when they were designing uniforms for each profession.
His assistants were a padded-up fat guy with medals all over his chest, and a little thin guy with a
rat-nose mask.
First, Hitler hypnotized twenty-two million Germans: he gestured magically at a d├йcoupage of a large
crowd held up by the two guys.
Then they painted Stars of David on the plate glass, and Hitler threw a brick through it.
His assistants came back with a big map of Poland, and he sawed it in half with a ripsaw.
After each trick, he said,: "Abracadabra, please and gesundheit!"
Then they brought out three chairs, and three people came out on stage and sat down in them.
In the first, a young woman in her twenties. In the second sat a man in his forties, playing on a violin. At
the end chair, an old man in his eighties.
Hitler the Magnificent took off his cloak and covered the young woman. "Abracadabra, please and
gesundheit!" he said, and pulled away the cloak. The chair was empty except for a wisp of smoke
drifting toward the ceiling. He put the cape over the violinist, repeated the incantation, and snapped it
away. In the chair was the violin and a lampshade with a number on it. He covered the old man, spoke,
and raised the cloth. In the chair seat there was now a bar of soap. The thin assistant picked it up and
threw it into a nearby goldfish bowl of water. "So light it floats!" he said.
Prop men lit fires along the pipes and pushed them toward Hitler the Magnificent and the two
assistants. Surrounded by the closing ring of fire, with a mannequin wearing a brown-blond wig and a
wedding dress in his arms, he climbed onto the two-by-four platform, miming great heights, and jumped
down next to a wet Luger water pistol, while the fat and thin assistants drank green Kool-Aid from a
washtub and fell to the floor.
The stagelights lowered, and the only sound was the whoosh of the fire extinguisher putting out the
flames on the pipes.
Then the lights came back up.
You could have heard a pin drop. Then--
It wasn't quite the Paris premiere of Le Sacre du printemps in 1913, but it might as well have been.
You'd think with the whole twentieth century behind us, and a few years of this one, and Mel Brooks'
The Producers, most of the oomph would have gone out of things like this. But you'd be wrong.
I got out the fire exit about the time the firemen and the riot squad came in through it.