YOU LOOK AMAZING

ROBERT appears. He’s super hot but you can tell there’s something going on with him. He’s a little weird, like just a little bit off, kinda sweaty, kinda nervous, his hair is theoretically nice-looking but it’s styled in an unflattering way. He wears a suit that’s conspicuously old-fashioned and too big for him. He’s fidgety. Still hot though, I want to be clear about that.

He talks to us. His tone is friendly enough, but is he sincere???

ROBERT
Hi. My name is Robert.

For two years I never looked in a mirror.

My body became a thing I could take pleasure in. It felt like it was mine and mine alone, and I was greedy about it. I spent hours lying on my back, looking at the expanse of skin and hair stretched out in front of me: a landscape, a terrain. I didn’t consider how I might change it because it seemed unchangeable. I started to like my body a lot because it was so sensitive, so wonderfully reactive. I could exist in a state of half-arousal for hours, thrumming with sexy feelings, just delighting in my body’s ability to feel turned on.

To be clear, I wasn’t free from shame. I often felt guilty for wasting so much time lying around naked, doing nothing. I was ashamed to discover how decadent, how self-indulgent I could be. Without the objectivity of a reflection, I became perfectly myopic: my interest in the world extended no further than my own body.

Then I started spending lots of time on Grindr. I scrolled through the grid endlessly and gazed at pictures of people gazing at themselves in mirrors. Eventually I wanted to participate, so I got reacquainted with my reflection. I put together my own collection of naked (or mostly-naked) photos. This wasn’t an unpleasant experience; it’s sexy to get naked and take pictures of yourself. It's titillating to cast the mirror as a potential lover, to invite other people to project fantasies onto your body—“imagine your hand here on this part of me,” the mirror selfies say, “imagine how nice that will feel.”

One of my classmates in high school was a girl named Emily Fetner. She was painfully shy, in a way that was sort of debilitating. We spent years sitting in the same classrooms, but I knew almost nothing about her. Her speaking voice was very quiet and she always sounded congested. During summer break between our junior and senior years, Emily asked me to go to a wedding with her. This came as a huge surprise. We had never even had a conversation before. I think it was her cousin’s wedding; the ceremony and the reception were held at the drab Elks Lodge on Main Street.

I had never met anyone in Emily’s family, but she graciously introduced me to her parents and aunts and uncles. Emily and I sat together at a folding table covered in flimsy pink paper placemats and we talked for several hours. I asked her lots of questions about her life, which she answered gamely. I don’t remember anything I learned about her that night, except that she had a passion for wolves. After the wedding, she sent me an email to say thank you and to tell me it would not have been any fun without me there, and also to apologize for not offering me a ride home. The truth is I felt bored and resentful during the wedding itself, but I was buoyed through that night—and for many months after—by the incredible feeling that I’d done something very noble and selfless. I felt heroic for accepting this out-of-the-blue invitation from a girl whom I assumed was desperately lonely and starved for simple kindness. And on top of that, I was flattered that Emily had thought to invite me in the first place—not because she had any social capital (she didn’t), but because the invitation appealed to my narcissism. It thrilled me to think that this shy girl had silently watched me in class for years, no doubt marveling at how charismatic, funny, and interesting I was, and I loved that she had also apparently taken note of my fundamentally openhearted and gentle nature.

I’m very bad at handling the small indignities that come with having a job. I guess you could say I’m proud. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to do anything productive with my pride. Above all, I want to be respected and admired without ever putting myself in a position where I might experience even a small amount of discomfort or embarrassment.

I think constantly about the stories people will tell at my wedding. I try to manufacture situations in which I am able to do generous things for people, not because of a true inner goodness but because I imagine my friends and family members will recall the generous things I did and talk about them publicly at my wedding reception.

Suddenly, there are 200 people standing around Robert.

These 200 people are wearing tuxedos and dresses. They’re all holding foot-long hotdogs—every single person in this crowd is cradling a massive foot-long hotdog in a bun, with ketchup, mustard, relish, chopped onions.

Robert does not acknowledge that he is surrounded by a very large group of people.

Each and every one of the 200 people lifts their respective hotdog to their mouth and takes a bite, all at the exact same time; 200 hotdogs are lifted to 200 mouths, in unison. The people all try to avoid spilling condiments onto their fancy outfits, so they hold their hotdogs at an awkward angle and sort of lean forward to keep their bodies away from any falling relish.

A young woman wearing a nice blue dress—NINA—emerges from the crowd and approaches Robert and starts talking to him.

NINA
You look amazing. I’m so nervous.

ROBERT
Don’t be nervous, you’re gonna be great.

NINA
I just don’t know how to talk to all these different people in a way that will affect them all the same way. You know?

ROBERT
Well. It’s okay to affect different people in different ways. Right?

NINA
I want to be—I want to have control over how my speech is received.

ROBERT
I see. You might have to give up on that.

NINA
Like, cheap sentiment might be what some people here are looking for.

ROBERT
Yeah that’s probably true.

NINA
But I can’t risk other people thinking I’m a sap. Or a bad speech-giver. Or an unoriginal thinker or whatever.

ROBERT
No one’s gonna think you’re a sap.

NINA
I have this aunt who—she has this um, this book of inspirational quotes? And she cries every time she reads it. Every time. These are quotes you’ve seen a million times before, they’re clichés, it’s a book of clichés, but it doesn’t matter: my aunt is so genuinely touched by these quotes, she loves them, they really speak to her in this very beautiful way. And I’ve always found it amazing, her emotional response to this quote book, because it’s—the whole point of a cliché is that it doesn’t have the power to move us. But the clichés in this book move my aunt to tears. These quotes really inspire her, she finds comfort in them. I don’t mean to sound patronizing! I don’t mean to sound patronizing!!!!

The 199 people remaining in the crowd throw their hotdogs on the ground.

Now the people in the crowd acknowledge each other for the first time. They all make eye contact. They move closer together. They touch, they hold each other. The gestural vocabulary is drawn from the array of polite physical interactions we’ve all had at weddings: a hand gently clutching an upper arm, a hand resting on a shoulder, a tight embrace accompanied by rapid back-slapping.

The people in the crowd are excited to be close to one another, this is an intimacy they welcome. The touching is polite. Nothing indecent.

Nina and Robert do not participate in any of this. They stand silently, apart from the crowd. Nina looks really nice in her blue dress. Robert is hot as hell. He’s shifty, though.

The people in the crowd draw closer and closer together, gradually pulling themselves into a tight little mob. They’re still patting, rubbing, hugging, stroking, handshaking. The touching remains chaste. The mob becomes a writhing mass of 199 bodies, so that one person is indistinguishable from the next. All we can see is a big shapeless glob of dark suits, corsages, the straps of dresses, the bouncy curls of blown-out hair.

And suddenly: blackout.

Total darkness for half a second.

Then, in a moment of breathtaking stage magic, the lights come back up to reveal that the crowd is gone! They’ve vanished, leaving only the detritus of their foot-long hotdogs strewn across the floor.

Nina and Robert are alone. Quiet and stillness.

NINA
Do you remember when we were kids—just having the feeling of like: I’ve met the best people I’ll ever know?

ROBERT
I do remember that feeling.

NINA
And we were wrong. Obviously. We just knew… some people. The people who happened to be around at the time.

Was it weird for you to move away?

ROBERT
I freaked out. No I didn’t freak out.

NINA
I freaked out a little when I finally left.

ROBERT
Did you? I always imagined you were moving confidently in the direction of whatever. You seemed like you were getting tattoos and going on hikes and going to concerts. You seemed like you were so ready for all that.

NINA
I literally don’t have a tattoo. To this day.

ROBERT
Wow yeah me neither. Interesting.

NINA
The guy I had sex with for the first time sang all of Bohemian Rhapsody to me.

ROBERT
The guy I had sex with for the first time was fine, but in the midst of sex we played out this whole ridiculous script of like: “You’re amazing, I’m so glad my first time is with someone I really care about and have deep feelings for, I wouldn’t want to be doing this with anyone else.” Meanwhile we met like four days prior at some freshman orientation event.

NINA
Do you like remembering this stuff?

ROBERT
Yes.

NINA
Me too. I love it. It freaks me out how much I love reminiscing. Sometimes I wonder why no other type of conversation brings me the same kind of joy. There is no purer joy for me than recalling shared memories with people. Is that bad?

ROBERT
Um. I don’t think so.

NINA
Okay. I think I’m drunk. Wedding wine. I think I’m fucked up. When I close my eyes I still see you, Robert, but you’re more natural somehow. Not that the real you is fake. The real you is fine. Good, even. But if I close my eyes I can see you in a state that I would describe as primordial. You know? You’re made of bedrock. You’re a solid, ancient thing, a way-down-deep thing, still you but essential. Forever. This is what I see:

NINA
Does that make sense?

A man named CHRIS appears. He’s wearing a black suit with a red tie.

His closeness with Nina and Robert is immediately apparent.

CHRIS
I remember this girl Mariah was like threatening to beat you up after school one day, Nina.

NINA
Oh my god I remember this.

ROBERT
I do too!

CHRIS
It was Mariah and her friend, who was kind of her henchman. I think the friend’s name was—

NINA
Abby? Right?

CHRIS
Maybe yeah. And I remember the threat of being beat up by Mariah and Abby was so intense for you. It didn’t feel like a joke. At all. These girls were scary.

NINA
Yeah they were.

CHRIS
And what I remember so clearly, more than anything else, is how you cried when you talked about it. Like, you told me and Robert that you were afraid to walk to your car after school, and as you were talking, these huge tears came out of your eyes. It was the size of the tears that struck me at the time. They were like cartoon tears. Really big and well-defined. And they somehow held their shape as they rolled down your cheeks.

The three of them stand together in silence for a long moment.

Nina absentmindedly picks up one of the discarded hotdogs. It’s rubbery and covered in smudges of bright yellow mustard. Nina holds the hotdog upright in her fist and it flops limply to one side.

She considers taking a bite but then decides not to.

ROBERT
I find it very painful to imagine living without the two of you.

CHRIS
That’s not something you would say in real life.

ROBERT
Well it’s something true. So.

NINA
“Do you think we would be friends if we met as adults” is something one of us could say right now.

CHRIS
“We all live such different lives!”

ROBERT
No, we’re—we’re not standing around at a wedding “catching up.” We’re not saying dumb shit to each other. We’re doing something else.

CHRIS
What are we doing?

ROBERT
We’re in a place with no mirrors.

NINA
What kind of place?

ROBERT
It’s a natural place, a nature place. Dirt, trees. A fast-moving river.

We didn’t have to work hard to get here. We didn’t climb up the side of a mountain or anything, we just found ourselves here. And so we’re here. We look around and we think: okay, good, this is nice, this is tranquil, there are birds and we can hear them singing.

We’re sitting together and we’re free to do exactly what we want to do. There are no rules here. And the best part is we don’t even need to be told that there are no rules, we can just intuit it, we can sense what kind of place this is. We’re totally unwatched, unseen.

The air is chilly and the sun is starting to set. Chris, your face is pink from the cold. You look so damn cute.

Chris smiles.

ROBERT
I reach out and touch your face with my hand. You understand the gesture perfectly. There is no misunderstanding. You lean into my touch gratefully, and the moment is sensual, sweet, deeply affectionate.

ROBERT
And Nina, you give me your hand and I hold it. We hold hands for a long time.

It isn’t weird at all. We don’t think about how long two people should hold hands, we aren’t aware of time passing, and we don’t think about the sweat on our palms, or how firm our grip is—we only feel the pleasure of being by a river, holding hands.

Robert still looks hot and disheveled.

Has something about him changed…?

Is he, perhaps, just a bit less disheveled than before? Is he slightly less off-putting? Less nervous?

It seems like he just said something honest, so that’s good. Maybe he’s more trustworthy than he seemed at the beginning of this play. Maybe he’s glowing with the light of truth.

I don’t mean to suggest that Robert was lying before. He just seemed like he was up to something, you know?

He keeps talking. Nina and Chris are good listeners. They don’t interrupt.

ROBERT
I don’t know. I don’t know. I just want to be in a place that’s pretty. And private. And I want to live in that place with my best friends. When I imagine the family I’ll make one day, I imagine it will involve you guys.

He’s talking about Nina and Chris. They’re flattered.

ROBERT
It’s not like a plan or anything, it’s like a vision. That’s what I’m trying to say. It’s a daydream. We live in this rustic but comfortable house by a river, and it’s just us: the three of us, a family unit. And we each have little domestic responsibilities but no real jobs. We cook nice meals for each other and we’re in love the way friends are in love, the way the three of us love each other right now.

NINA
But… I wanna have a family.

CHRIS
Yeah. Me too.

NINA
Like, a real family. With a partner. I want to have a wedding.

CHRIS
Yeah same.

ROBERT
Oh.

NINA
Sorry Robert. Your thing sounds nice, though.

ROBERT
I thought you guys would be into this.

CHRIS
I didn’t know you wanted isolation so badly. Don’t you want to be part of a community?

NINA (to Robert)
You love community!

ROBERT
A community is just a bunch of people who know too much about you.

CHRIS
It’s nice to be known!

ROBERT
Yeah sure, but if I’m gonna be known I have to be known all the way. I have to be fully, absolutely known. I can’t run the risk of being misunderstood. I have to rip myself open and get so vulnerable that it’s literally physically painful. Like I’m talking about revealing the most vile, unforgivably cruel and selfish parts of me, the very worst parts. And I can’t do that with a whole community, it’s not practical!! I don’t have the time! I can only do that with, like, two people. Which is to say: being part of a community means being half-known by a lot of people, it means being superficially known. Which is annoying because you’re, like, accountable to these people, but you don’t feel truly loved or understood by them.

Nina and Chris both think that Robert just said something really ugly and cynical. But they keep this thought to themselves.

NINA
Ugh. I got relish on my dress. I need to look in a mirror.

CHRIS
You look really pretty tonight, Nina. I meant to say that earlier.

NINA
Oh thanks, Chris! That’s so nice.

ROBERT
I feel self-conscious in this suit. The airline lost my luggage on my flight here, so I had to borrow a suit from my cousin who lives in town.

NINA
You look good. I didn’t even notice.

ROBERT
But you’re drunk. You’re wedding drunk.

CHRIS
Maybe we should do something like lie in the grass and look up at the stars. Or actually we should do something risky. We should take a risk! We should try to experience something we’ve never experienced before, like—let’s try to feel a new feeling. I read about this Sardinian cheese that has live maggots in it. I read the Wikipedia page. You eat the cheese while it’s decomposing and full of maggot juice. I hated reading about it but I also felt weirdly compelled to find this cheese and confront it head-on. (Sorry for talking about this disgusting cheese while you’re drunk, Nina.) I don’t know why this is on my mind. There are other ways to take risks. We could do drugs. Drugs are a good way to experience new things. We used to do drugs together. I’m afraid doing something we used to do together will make me feel sad and nostalgic in a bad way. I really like being with you both. It’s fun. And it’s very beautiful here, it’s a lovely cool night, these hanging lights are so nice and the flowers on all the tables are just. So nice. The candles. And Robert, and Nina, you look so good in candle light, you look like romantic heroes, like people from a movie.

Nina worries about what she’s going to say in her speech. The end.