Richard Kostelanetz: Experimental Prose

SCENES FROM DRIVE-IN MOVIES

(Adapted from 1001 Opera Libretti- I)

Main feature - "Love Factory": A young woman informs a wealthy family that she is their daughter who was kidnaped twenty years before. The young woman, who inherits the factory that employs most of a small town falls in love with a laborer . . . Everyone is pleased about the eloping young lovers except the grandfather who had endowed the bride's trust fund.

Second feature - "Thugz": Several black women, living in a decrepit tenement on a dead-end street, struggle to overcome sexism, racism, and economic exploitation. A band of unemployed war veterans organize an urban posse to capture long-wanted criminals. Young immigrant, joining a local street gang, makes the tactical mistake of becoming the secret lover of the gang leader's freshly nubile young daughter. A veteran crook returns from prison to find his son beginning, with his mother's encouragement, a criminal life. A teenage black gang, railroaded into long prison terms for crimes they did not commit, becomes a popular cause for fashionable people, who eventually succeed in exonerating the young men, the story ending, alas, before we can discover whether they can use their rediscovered freedom beneficially.

Third Feature - "Welcome to Sci-Fi High": A young man who has spent his entire life imprisoned in a zoo falls in love with two newcomers - a freshly hired female zookeeper and a young man hiding among the elephants to evade police. A hacker-nerd falls for a preternaturally devious teenager (of indefinite gender) who initiates him into a life of computer crime. Students at a purportedly classy boarding school revolt against being ritually lobotomized by their teachers who know full well that distance from paying parents gives them opportunities unavailable to public school employees. A variety of genuinely attractive sex recipients tempt a Catholic priest to break his vows. A body-builder, drunk on his own strength, comes to believe that his body has become an easily detonated bomb. Juvenile zombies guard diamonds hidden in a sunken ship, initially from piracy by their avaricious parents and then from retired policemen. A space ship heading for the planet Pluto breaks the time barrier and thus returns to Earth in the thirtieth century.