I got into a silly
mood one day, and decided to write some dialog.
An exchange between a store employee and an eccentric, dimwitted
customer offered a good chance for some funny writing.
Scene: The Paint
Department of a big ticket hardware store (think Home Depot).
A large 60’ish woman enters, looking around for someone who
can help her. She is neatly dressed in a
red polyester pantsuit. Her bottle-blonde
hair is done in a large bouffant and is so heavily sprayed that a hurricane
wouldn’t blow it out of shape. She has
long nails, painted red with gold spangle dragons on each finger. Her voice is a combination of Fran Drescher
and Lena Lamont (the dumb blonde movie star in “Singin’ in the Rain”).
She sees a young male store employee and signals to him. He is about 21 years old, tall and lithe,
with wavy brown hair.
WOMAN: Hello! Do you work here?
EMPLOYEE: They pay me
every week, so I guess so. What do you
need?
WOMAN: You’re not
sure if you work here? You’re dressed
like you work here, so I thought you worked here.
EMPLOYEE: I work
here.
WOMAN: Why didn’t you
say so?
EMPLOYEE: Sorry. What can I do for you?
WOMAN: I’m turning my
walk-in closet into a coffee room and I need some paint.
EMPLOYEE: A coffee
room?
WOMAN: Yeah. You know.
Like a tea room, only for coffee.
EMPLOYEE: A room for
drinking coffee?
WOMAN: For drinking
coffee and eating where nobody can see you, so they don’t know you’re eating
and drinking coffee and don’t drag you to a detox program like they did to my
aunt, which made her have a stroke from the shame. I don’t want to get a stroke from shame.
EMPLOYEE: I don’t blame you, Lady. You said you need paint?
WOMAN: Yeah.
Just a minute. (She fishes in her
purse and pulls out a sandwich bag containing a piece of fruit, which she hands
to the employee.) There.
EMPLOYEE: What’s this?
WOMAN: A pomegranate.
EMPLOYEE: I can see that. What’s it for?
WOMAN: That’s the color I want my coffee room to be.
EMPLOYEE: We can’t mix anything that looks like this. This is streaked with a few different shades.
WOMAN: You can’t make a paint that will go on the
wall like that?
EMPLOYEE (laughing): Lady, you would have to hire Michelangelo to
paint a wall like that.
WOMAN: Is he available?
EMPLOYEE (looking askance): He’s dead.
WOMAN: Oh.
Well, then, can you match the color in the center of that one streak
there?
EMPLOYEE: Which one?
WOMAN: That little one there.
EMPLOYEE: I can hardly see it.
WOMAN (touching the fruit with the
tip of a fingernail): There. That streak.
I like that streak better than the other streaks.
EMPLOYEE: Whatever you say. I’ll give this to the guy who mixes the
paints and see what he can do. I’ll just
mark where your favorite streak is.
(Takes out a black marker pen and starts to draw an arrow on the fruit)
WOMAN: Will I be able to eat it after you mark it up
like that?
EMPLOYEE: You want to eat this or you want to give it
to the guy to match the color? You can’t
do both, Lady.
WOMAN: What if I just eat around my streak, and you
give the guy the piece that’s left.
EMPLOYEE: Uh … he won’t touch it if you do that. He has Saliva-Hydro-Phobia.
WOMAN (not wanting to admit that
she doesn’t know what Saliva-Hydro-Phobia might be): Well … okay.
I don’t like pomegranates, anyway.
I just heard that they can remove wrinkles, like Botox, only without
needles.
EMPLOYEE: Okay, so … you really want this color?
WOMAN: It’s a good color. I’m going to call the room the Pomegranate
Room.
EMPLOYEE: Why not the Coffee Room?
WOMAN: Everybody has a place to drink coffee. Nobody has a Pomegranate Room.
EMPLOYEE: Okay.
Give me a minute and I’ll go ask the guy who mixes the paints if he can
match this. I’ll be right back.
(EMPLOYEE leaves, taking the fruit
with him.)
WOMAN (to herself): Michelangelo died? I thought he just got married to Paris
Hilton.
