Old man leans on a wall outside a hotel. He’s smoking a cigarette and dressed in jeans and a suit jacket.

Nobody mentioned the star, her costume fanning on the floor and lipstick bleeding down her chin. Nobody said a word as the stage call sounded, nobody knew, really. She was sixteen, pretty with those pouted lips, and a body like glass. If a girl were a drink, she’d be mine. But she was nobody’s really, but everybody wanted to be her business. The stage hands hassled her with notes, sometimes chocolate gifts, little silver trinkets that they probably stole from their girlfriends, wives, mothers, and they woke her up in the night with their knocks. I did the lightening in that show, crouched in the eves, watching the peacock feathers blur; watching the audience, drunk with anticipation and excitement; watching her, dance and dance and dance.

My Father always said a girl had to have good feet, good arches. I remember him telling me as he showed me how to light up the stage and how, in some ways each girl was our bulb. My Father said he lit up my Mother, and there she was, down on the floor, dancing and dancing. She was amazing, my Mother. She could spin any joke between curtain calls, she made the younger boys glow, the older ones aspire, she made each girl that hit that stage a star. Now Father and Mother aren’t around, the business changed a little, the customers got stranger, the boys grew. The piss became bitter, and suddenly dancing went brown.

And I guess I was to blame, I was so caught up in that show, the wonderful show that I didn’t notice what it had become and I keep losing myself in its love, its light. Until her…until she came along…pretty with those pouted lips, and a body like glass.

[Brings a hand to his face and wipes it across his face, his eyes close slightly as he does so: a slow blink]

I gave her light, but I never touched her, I swear. Only with my spotlight. She was red, yellow, green, purple, pink all in one night. Every night she was my star, even after the curtain fell, and there was applause and nothing and darkness—night after night, well done. I gave her beginnings and endings and she gave me a lonely sort of love.

Sometimes she turned my way, and the light would make a ghost of her face, her makeup would be so heavy, and her chin would drop a little…her lips full of rose lipstick, cheeks full of rouge. I always looked at her face, sometimes even glanced at her body, those legs bound in fishnets and the marvellous puffing dress. With those tail-feathers, those feathers were art before burlesque became dirty dancing.

On the week before the curtain fell for its last time, things became difficult, tensions were high and careers were being broken, pay checks being handed out, worlds ending, so many tears, even my own.

[Stubs out his cigarette]

Nobody said a word as the stage call sounded, nobody knew, really…the girl I lit up laid burnt out in the dressing room, her face still warm from so many years of dancing, but without pulse she was nothing. I found her; I screamed her name down the halls, wrenched open the door and everything disintegrated. What dancing had given her, had taken from her. I gave her beginnings and endings and she gave me a lonely sort of love…Yep, a lonely sort of love. And in my sadness, that gripping grief, I leant down and kissed her forehead and… and I whispered, Take me with you, take me, too.

[Pushes off the wall, and disappears into the crowded street]