Love Prisoner

"Love Prisoner" is the name of a program Joe Frank produced as part of the series The Other Side (series).

Synopsis

• Joe fantasizes about a life with a woman he passes. She carries a cello case on casters.
• Monologue on love: love is likened to various exotic tortuous experiences. Love compared to precious things. Love as a fine wine, as becoming Edward Teller. A clown commits harakiri with a letter opener after being dumped by a harlequin.
• A relationship breakup as fission. Love as heroin. Description of a Love Anonymous support group. The members tell how long it has been since he or she was in love. The congratulate each other on their ability to stay out of love. Why love? Joe chooses to be a bachelor for the rest of his life, join a mens' club, build a latrine.
• Joe fantasizes about and then regrets not asking out women he encounters. Joe uses the show to asks the women or anyone who knows the women who may be listening to the show to call the KCRW office and leave her details so he may contact her. The first is a woman who returns his umbrella at a Lars Von Trier film at the Laemmle Theater in Santa Monica, Ca. She is with an obnoxious man who kept talking during the film. He imagines that the man is her retarded relative. He imagines a life with her and what he might say to her. It has been many months since the incident and he does not remember the exact date, so he is afraid it will not happen. Next, he sees a woman seen in a museum and later thinks about what he could have said to start a conversation. She leaves and Japanese school girls enter the exhibit and make sketches of the paintings on the wall. Joe encounters a third woman at a pet store who is naturally beautiful with no make-up. Joe imagines them spending time on the beach with her and the golden retriever he imagines she might have (all while contemplating the invention of cat litter).
• Monologue: Love is an old man fishing off a bridge. He remembers an explosion that kills his father and leaves him mute.
• Joe wanders through a retirement home, second person address to Darlene, remembrance of a spectacular public breakup, his ex seduces the elevator man as she's leaving. Joe thanks Darlene for vengeful gifts.
• Everyone needs love. Joe describes different types of people from all walks of life that need love. Disconnected nonsense verse. He imagines dismembering Darlene and displaying parts of her around his house or on his person, asks for his things back.
• The conductor of an orchestra explodes on stage at the beach. Socrates' last words. Finding eternity within ourselves. Joe's father ground to a fine past in a machine accident. A failed suicide pact.
• Joe is a cab driver: he overhears an argument in a foreign language. The woman stops to pray on a mat and in a specific direction, the man sprinkles rose water from a flask, they drive to Atlantic city only to return.
• Joe enters the large office of an executive of a company. The man urinates from the balcony and invites Joe to do the same. The man revels in the ability to do this.

Interesting Facts

• This is a remix of monologues from earlier shows.
• The monologue about love is shared with Windows, Lover Man.
• Includes loops of the Lomax Parchman Farm recordings.
• Joe reworked and used some material from this show at his live show at the Chicago Art Institute in 2003.

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