For an acting class I had to write and perform a monologue. I took the CARES bank story and rewrote it from the robber’s perspective. I took some liberties but did validate the details with the police artist. This is what I imagined he said.

The Plan Was Perfect

How the hell did this happen? I never thought I’d end up in jail. I mean, it was a perfect plan! I cleaned banks, so I knew their routines. But I needed money, and a lot of it.

Even though it’s the 1980s, most banks have video security systems that suck. I just knew I could beat the system, and I figured out a great disguise. Sure, clothes were easy, but how to hide my face? I thought about a Halloween mask, but figured the cops would ask at the local stores. So, I decided to make one.

I took a white sweatshirt, cut off a sleeve and cut eyes and mouth holes into it. When I looked at myself in the mirror, everything was covered. The eyes and mouth were just dark spots. Genius, right? And the robbery went off real well.

The next day, when I watched the garbage truck carry away my sweatshirt parts, I was on top of the world. I didn’t want to do anything to attract attention. I even WENT TO WORK!

The cops picked me up a few days later to question me, but they didn’t have a damned thing. They showed me the video of the robbery, but it was just a guy wearing a sweatshirt sleeve – not me! I thought I was home free.

Then they showed a photo of ME robbing the bank without the sleeve on, and I was friggin’ shocked. I asked, “How the hell did you get that photo? Are you guys using an x-ray camera? That’s illegal.” Man, I was pissed.

In court, the police artist explained that she studied how pantyhose over a face changes the nose and ears so she could add them in. She put in a standard men’s haircut, eyes, mouth – and there I was.

I mean, fuck, who the hell studies how pantyhose squashes a face?

The problem with being a camp counsellor is assuming you know how to do it.

It’s the summer of 69, and I just finished my first year of university. Last summer, I was a local camp counsellor, so hey, I know the ropes. This summer’s job is camp counsellor for boys from the slums of New York City. The camp is 14 miles from the August Woodstock concert.

While all the kids are boys, the counsellors are both men and women. The women have the young campers. We’ve been warned that these kids are hard.

For the George Brown College Playwriting course, we were asked to write several short monologues. These three monologues are short dialogues of myself discussing the CARES system for aging missing children by computer.

CARES (Computer Assisted Recovery Enhancement System), a computer system for aging missing children announced on July 4, 1986, was a joint project between the Metropolitan Toronto Police and IBM Canada Lab. CARES was the first computer-based child-aging system in the world. View CARES details and press coverage

1. Monologue – CARES

Picture it, 1986. Jim Clark was head of the Youth Bureau of the Metro Toronto Police, the organization that finds missing kids. The challenge was finding kids that had gone missing for years. His artist wife Betté was working with a doctor at Sick Kids Hospital learning how kids age.

I have been through a fascinating exercise in the past few days. I am thinking of auditioning for a part. (Paravicini and The Mousetrap) The character is Italian so requires an Italian accent.

Basically an accent is when a speaker uses their native language phonetic rules to pronounce the English words. This gave me an idea. I went into the Amazon Web Services Polly. Polly is a text-to-speech engine. I put in the character’s dialog and asked Polly to treat it as Italian and read it.

Amazing. I had found another site on Italian accents for the stage. When I listened to Polly’s reading of the dialog, I hear many of the guidelines followed.

On July 20, 1969 two spacecraft landed in the Sea of Tranquility

one from the most powerful nation on earth, the United States, the other from the smallest, the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.

Who got there first?

Adapted by Rich Helms from the book The Mouse on the Moon by Leonard Wibberley

© 2021 by Rich Helms
CIPO ref# 1188353
ISBN: 978-0-9938829-4-4
www.richhelms.ca/themouseonthemoon/

Music: “The Complex” and “Marty Gots a Plan” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License