Fools

Last Saturday evening I attended a play by Neil Simon called "Fools." I had never heard of this play but took a chance just on Simon's reputation for writing wonderful humor. As I was waiting in line to be seated I asked a number of other members of the audience if they had ever seen this play. From the answers I got, I don't believe any of them had heard of Neil Simon before. This was a local cast from the Mojave Community College and I was looking forward to seeing what they could do.

Oh, well, this was my first adventure out into the world of theater since I moved from my big city of San Luis Obispo, California to tiny Lake Havasu City, Arizona. Having lived here for 6 months I was starved for live theater of some kind.

The premise of the play was hysterically funny. A small village in the Ukraine had advertised for a schoolteacher. When the teacher showed up he was astounded at how stupid the residents seemed to be. The man who requested his presence was the town doctor and when they finally met up it was the doctor's daughter that needed some academic help. (Understatement of the year)

When the schoolteacher met the daughter it was love at first sight!!! By Gawd, she was stupid. The entire cast went on for nearly 2 hours showing how dumb they were. I was beginning to feel uncomfortable because they seemed rather common in their basic knowledge to today's citizens.

Apparently 200 years ago the Duke of this village had fallen in love with a lovely peasant woman but she turned him away. In his fury he put a curse on the village that all people and their progeny would be stupid forever until the present Duke removed the curse.

Somehow my mind was brought up to making the association between the Duke's curse and the Democrats dumbing down of our public schools. (What the hell did you expect me to do?)

Generations of villagers were just as dumb as their parents and their children would obviously be even stupider. On with the story.....

The Duke was in love with the doctor's daughter! If she would have him in marriage the village would regain their brains. (Yeah, sure!) The doctor's daughter was in love with the schoolteacher and they broke for intermission.

The Duke and the schoolteacher met up and discussed this terrible predicament. The schoolteacher had 24 hours to either teach the daughter to be smart or he too would fall into the realm of the curse. (Enter intrigue)

The schoolteacher worked with his love and one plus one was solved; two plus one was another subject and the time ran out. They tried a ruse where the Duke would adopt the schoolteacher and allow him to marry her, but that didn't fly with the townspeople, or the Duke.

The schoolteacher pretended to lose his brainpower and married the young girl, but after the ceremony he turned to the audience and admitted that falling into the pit of stupidity was only because they were told that this is the way things would be. He implanted the concept that if they tried, they too could be smart!

It worked! They all thought it over and all became fairly smart. The play was over and the audience applauded the whole thing.

I stopped to congratulate the cast still unable to stop making the association between today's young people and the play. I shook the hand of the young girl and asked her "When was the play written?" and she looked me in the eye and replied, "What play?"

When I got home I looked up the play and discovered it was first presented in 1981. Evidently Simon had a notion just where our public school graduates would end up in society. Sad, sad, sad...

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