This is a series of three monologues from the same character in The Amazon Exercises. The characters are fictional. The stories are true.
Note to the actor: Some acronyms are spelled out when spoken (PMQ, NCO, DND, PO) and some are turned into "words" (DEW is pronounced "dew").
(GERRY FREDERICKSON, a
contemporary woman in her
thirties, is seated
comfortably on the chair in
the playing area. There's a
white lab coat tossed over the
arm of the chair, but that's
not important yet.)
GERRY
It's natural enough. Every kid growing up on an air
base wants to join the military. I'd've enlisted
straight out of grade ten if my dad would've let me
quit school.
Of course, that was the year that the principal's
daughter trashed my gym locker; if I'd thought it'd get
me out of school, I'd've shaved my head bald and
painted it blue.
The service is your life. You go to a DND school, you
live in PMQ housing and you sell your girl guide
cookies at the barracks next door to the NCO club. The
military has acronyms for everything. Daddy says
that's to teach the officers how to spell. DND, that's
the Department of National Defense, and PMQs, those are
Permanent Married Quarters, and NCOs are non-
commissioned officers.
Air bases are little worlds all of their own. In
school, when civilian kids were going on field trips to
farms and bakeries, we toured the air traffic control
tower and a radar installation.
You know, you can't take your Instamatic into a DEW-
line site.
That's D-E-W, an acronym for Distant Early Warning.
There's a hospital on base, too. We had all our shots,
and then some. I remember there was a diphtheria
epidemic and the civilian kids didn't have to get
vaccinated. We had our teeth checked every six
months, usually with a different dentist every time.
It wasn't that we moved that often. The air force
dentists did.
I was one of those kids who screamed blue murder from
the second they got in the chair. The first time I had
my teeth cleaned, I hyperventilated and passed out
completely.
But your dental care is free. I got my first filling
when we were posted to Trenton. I remember I lost it a
week later chewing on a jelly dollar. Jeez, was Daddy
POed. That's another acronym.
You get to travel, but one base is a lot like another.
Instead of growing up next door to someone, you become
penpals.
Did you ever write plane letters? Not "plain and
simple" but "plane", as in "off we go, into the wild
blue yonder". Well, this is what you do when a
girlfriend is moving away. She writes a letter to
every one of her best friends, and we all write letters
to her. You can put all the most private personal
stuff in them, because here's the rule. None of us
opens the envelopes until the girl who's leaving gets
on the plane. Then you lock yourself in your room with
a box of Kleenex to read it. That's a plane letter.
You change schools a lot. The curriculum varies in
funny ways from one school to the next. When the dust
settled, I'd studied Canadian pioneer history three
times over, and I never did get to World War Two.
(Pause.)
I didn't visit a public library until I was fifteen
years old. That was the same year I rode an escalator
for the first time. That was the year my sister
visited a civilian orthodontist, who wanted to know how
our family dentist had missed noticing that all of her
molars had come in completely sideways.
GERRY (second monologue)
As you can imagine, I enrolled in Air Cadets as soon as
they let girls into our local squadron. I gotta say,
whoever designed Canadian military procedure sure as
hell didn't plan to put women in uniform.
In cadets you don't really own those uniforms. You pay
money for them when they're issued, but you could sell
them back later. So there are no new uniforms.
They've all been worn before, and you can tell.
But they were never designed for a teenaged girl. So
you drew trousers big enough for your butt and belted
them in. The jackets were more of a trick. Anything
big enough to go around my chest hung out over my
shoulders like wings. I compromised; I found an old
jacket that almost went around my bust. Since it was,
shall we say, well-broken in, the shoulders had
softened up and drooped a little more naturally. In
the right light, I looked like Joan Crawford in army
boots.
Now I know that standing at attention isn't meant to be
comfortable, but... Ladies, try this experiment at
home.
(GERRY stands at attention,
demonstrating.)
Stand up straight. Feet together, shoulders back,
chest out, arms absolutely straight at your sides. Now
look in the mirror. In the correct military posture,
the inspecting officer should not be able to see
daylight between your straight arms and your sides.
"Frederickson! Arms straight!" "Yes sir!" "Straight!"
"They are, sir!" "I can still see daylight,
Frederickson!" "That's my waistline, sir!"
(Pause.)
I developed a surreptitious way of tucking my shoulders
forward that made the jacket pouch up at the sides, but
he caught me at that too. "Stand up, Frederickson!"
"Yes, sir!" "You can do better than that. Get that
chest out!"
(GERRY snaps to attention with
her chest thrust far forward.
Pause.)
The strain was more than the poor old uniform could
take, and the third button sprang off and hit him
square in the face.
GERRY (third monologue)
I didn't enlist after all. When I finally decided what
I wanted to be when I grew up, "in uniform" wasn't it.
(GERRY rises and dons her lab
coat while talking.)
Don't laugh, but I studied dentistry. I specialize in
treating people, mostly kids, who are deathly afraid of
dentists. My professors used to say that I had unusual
sympathy for my patients. No shit.
An air force brat puts herself through college.
There's just no extra money in a corporal's salary. So
I busted my buns working summers, and bitched a lot to
my best girlfriend, Sandy.
Sandy did enlist, went straight into officer training
out of high school, and they were putting her through
university. She got paid to go, too. She came back
from basic training wearing a rifle shell on a string
like a lucky charm.
I don't know when they slept during Basic, or where.
You see, when your barrack is inspected in the morning,
the officers want to see your bedding so tight they can
bounce a coin off it. Sandy did everything but nail
the bedclothes down to get it right. Eventually, she
put her steam iron on a huge extension cord and pressed
the bed. Once she got it right, she never slept in it
again. I think she slept underneath her cot for the
whole damned summer.
There's no life like it.
I'm told that you can fake a spit shine on your boots
with a good coat of black enamel paint.
I don't think it was any worse for the women than the
men. The Canadian Armed Forces is very committed to
increasing the representation of women in the service.
They've admitted women to the Royal Military College.
They're opening up an increasing number of positions,
including combat trades, to women.
(Pause.)
Sandy showed up in my office ten years after high
school. Wearing civvies. We hugged, and laughed, and
swapped phone numbers, and it turned out that she was
there to make an appointment.
(GERRY moves behind the chair
back and leans forward from
time to time, an echo of a
dentist's chair.)
Some butcher had been at work in her mouth. "What the
hell happened to you?" So much for my sympathetic
chairside manner. "The air force happened to me."
(Pause.)
It was when she was still an officer cadet. Needed a
checkup. Went to the base. You have to, you know.
You actually aren't allowed to visit a civilian doctor
or dentist.
There's no hygienist. He put her in the chair himself.
Bib. Light. Chair way back. He laid all his tools on
the apron on her chest. Now there are picks and
scalpels and lord-knows-what lying on her so she can't
move. And every time he changes tools, he rubs his
hand on her breasts just a bit. Don't jump.
But it's not the ugly story I'm expecting. He just
grabs cheap feels while he checks her teeth. No, it's
another ugly story altogether.
He's inside her mouth. There's a cavity. No X-ray,
but you don't always need one. She hears the drill.
Don't jump. What about a needle? It's just a
superficial cavity. Quicker. Easier. All you have to
do is stay still, lieutenant.
It's not a superficial cavity.
He keeps drilling, and stopping, and rinsing crunchy
spit off of the tooth. She's terrified, and something
in her mouth is bleeding. He prods with the pick, hits
nerve, and Sandy screams. He slams his forearm across
her chest to keep her from jumping, from sending all
those sharp and shining instruments flying.
No, he doesn't administer anesthetic. He doesn't admit
a mistake. He says, "Sit still and shut up. If you
girls want to be in the army, you're going to have to
learn to take pain."
Then he drilled into the nerve.
(Lights down.)