A monologue for the moment, by Mikki Russ
Hello, my name is Monique Fuckerberg, and I have been assigned your case. It has come to my attention that your Misogyhomophobotron2020, otherwise known as the MGH, may be causing you some irritation. I would like to go over its operating system with you. There are several ways the MGH begins to alarm, including when the optics detect a woman speaking on her own behalf, or if it spots a woman with footwear on outside of the kitchen, (unless that woman is bringing it a sammich, and then, the system is overridden). If the woman who exited the kitchen wearing footwear does not offer a sammich, the MGH requires a full reboot or for the offending woman to have a baby shoved up inside her as quickly as you can scramble one up. Please give the MGH a full view of the impacted hymen for quickest system recovery.
If the MGH has observed a lesbian, you may have heard the words, “She’s only gay because she hasn’t gotten a piece of this yet” emanating from its audio output source. This is because it’s fragile Ego-system has been rattled by its sensors picking up on a woman that isn’t picking up on it. Feel free to just go ahead and rub your vagina on it, so that perhaps that will distract it into a fully functional system restore in safe mode. Please do not commence with the vagina contact without saying the words, “You’re so handsome.” And “Oh no, honey, whatever would I do without you” preceding. Skipping that step may prevent the Ego-system from booting up properly and it might fall asleep on you before you reach your own personal fulfillment. Actually….looking over my notes here, it appears that this model isn’t programmed with Female Fulfillment, so either do or don’t say the words prescribed…but know you’re going to be disappointed for at least a portion of your evening.
Please look under the front panel of your MGH to see if there is any residue left over from exposure to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. If there is, immediately apply Chris Brown lyrics. Please do not try applying Chris Brown directly, as the residue may rile and obliterate him on contact and you don’t have enough money to take on his legal team.
MGH comes equipped with a Weight Recognition Apparatus. The unit is stored underneath it’s dunlap. You know, right there above the belt where his extra cushiness done-lapped-over? This is the sensitive spot where he is able to detect if a woman is overweight or under-weight.. If your MGH malfunctions and is unable to instruct a woman in her eating habits, please immediately put it in front of women judges, women CEOs or women physicists. This should cause internal combustion, thus jarring the mechanism back into functionality.
Your MGH should not be placed directly in front of a television that has not been set to sports, gaming or war movies. The potential for exposure to “Two Damn Men Kissing On Television” is just excessively high, and this causes the MGH to get its wires crossed, causing a real danger of regular outbursts of incoherent rage. Please make sure all entertainment input is sufficiently vetted.
Your MGH has limited understanding of the term “Trans”. It’s most recent application being a “Trans-Am” and a most frequently misunderstood concept – as recently as yesterday- when a transwoman tried to upload the term CIS-male into the MGH’s lexicon. This was met with a fracture in the MGH’s motherboard. As a side note…the motherboard has been renamed the “Otherboard” as to not upset the MGH’s Terminology Center.
Now that you have all of the available tools at your disposal for successful upkeep of your Misogyhomophobotron, we here at MGH2020 headquarters look forward to hearing your feedback on how well the MGH2020 is enhancing your life. Please send all correspondence to Monique Fuckerberg Attention: Eric Bump. I am unable to participate in written correspondence directly, as my daily chores take up considerable time, but Mr. Bump will happily convey all of your marvelous comments to me at an allocated time. Thank you for your participation and here’s wishing you many years of…usefulness.
THE END
Written by Mikki Russ
For rights/queries, please contact [email protected]
Performed as part of Prescott Vagina Monologues 2020
Shared with permission from the Playwright
Since the election, one of the things I’ve heard most often is, “I can’t believe this is where we are; I can’t believe this is what we are.” So I wanted to write something that responded to that disbelief and took it to its extreme conclusion. “Last of Our Kind” is a sort of social horror sci-fi story, which I thought was the right spirit for our political times. There’s not much more to say about the play, other than a wish that it always remains fiction.
TO HISTORY
The ending of DACA, and the lack of response to Puerto Rico, made me want to dig deeper into stories of the immigrant community. I recently met a woman, a beautiful Mexican woman who is a jazz singer, who shared with me heartbreaking stories of how she had been treated as a Mexican in America. How her humanity was questioned because she worked minimum wage or under the table jobs. I had another friend who recently saw her daughters fiancé off to basic training. He assumed that of course he would be naturalized, because he was willing to die for his adopted country. He had been singled out by recruiters because he was a poor undocumented Latino. I put the stories together, and it became a short story of a mother saying goodbye to her child.
It took me several drafts to get to the play below. The image of boxes fighting for space came to me after Charlottesville. I had also been reading Jeremiah Moss’s Vanishing New York about the gentrification of New York City in the twenty-first century.
I wrote this piece because I wanted to continue on with the trend of breaking the barriers of stereotypes in my community. A huge one that included myself, was that there aren’t many positive male figures in the stereotyped black home. I feel that this was a sensitive area for me and the men in my community. I actually didn’t have a strong relationship with my dad until I was much older and I grew to understand and appreciate him, however a lot of families aren’t that lucky. I hope that this piece will inspire black men to see that there definitely needs to be a change in the way we see ourselves and how others see us.
In this piece — which, yes, I wrote while in London (today) — I wanted to step back from everything and look at conversation, that lost art I so often miss in political discourse. I started out thinking about the weather and ended up with some sort of neo-Socratic dialogue, which wasn’t my aim, but that’s the great thing about writing: Being surprised.