Miles Zarathustra

Be-leaf Miles Zarathustra

Roberto has decided: he is doing a tree-sit. Living 200 feet above the ground in an old-growth redwood, to keep her from being logged. At the nearby University, Deanna is choreographing a dance to save the forest. She would visit Roberto, but for her fear of heights and insects. Hal, the logger wishes they would all just go away and let him do his job. Where will they get all the paper for the books they study if someone doesn't cut down trees? Welcome to Derbyville, pictoresquely located on the shores of beautiful lake Derby, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. A gently unfolding pastoral, where the lives of activists, loggers, and dancers intertwine in the stories surrounding a tree-sit to protest the destruction of old-growth redwoods. At one side of the stage, inaudible to the audience over the music, disc-jockey Robin Morninglory has Roberto on the phone for an interview... "I'm trying to picture you," he was saying. "Your voice is so familiar. What do you look like?" "I don't know. About yay tall, brown hair. What do I sound like I look like?" Roberto just laughed. "What? What's the joke I'm missing?" "I don't know if I should say." "Spit it out," she insisted. "Well, I was just thinking who people call up those 1-900 numbers, and get some lady on the other end with a sexy voice, imagining some spritely young thing. . ." "When in reality she's some rotund middle-aged matron in a chewed-up hot pink bathrobe and curlers. . ." "Right. And that kind of green beauty mud smeared all over her face." "So," she queried, "do you, uh, call these numbers frequently? Not a lot to do up there after all, is there?" "Hey, I've got a book by Marx." "Get a lot of reading done then?" "In fact I. . . No," he confessed. "Marx, wasn't he some relation to John Lenon?" "You're thinking of Groucho." "I'm not very 'up' on communism," she said. "Me either," he replied. "I think you have to drive a Volvo."