Dramatis Personae -

LOGITECH CORDLESS DESKTOP S 510: a wireless desktop suite with Media Controls Keyboard, Optical Mouse and Media Remote Combinations
DISEMBODIED VOICE: a disembodied voice
ELDERLY NUDE MAN: an old man with no clothes on

Darkness, silence. All at once we hear the sound of rusty gears grinding. A baby cries. The sound dies abruptly and a single overhead spotlight throws a circle of green light onto the center of the empty stage.

LOGITECH CORDLESS DEKTOP S 510: (from a dark corner of the stage) Remote, remote…

DISEMBODIED VOICE: Come to me. You are easily 16 feet away. You are distant, like a cold, marble statue of an unfeeling machine.

LOGITECH CORDLESS DEKTOP S 510: (stepping into the spotlight) Do we not watch cinema together?

DISEMBODIED VOICE: My father, too, could watch cinema. Films of cowboys, of soldier-men. Men who, like him, refused to manifest emotion. Cold, marble statues of machine-men, men.

LOGITECH CORDLESS DEKTOP S 510: (kneels) Do we not listen together to music?

DISEMBODIED VOICE: Music is the sound of feeling.

ELDERLY NUDE MAN: (rolling across the stage, singing) “You were lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine…”

DISEMBODIED VOICE: Remote, remote… Point your infrared eye at me. Prove that you see me. Come close.

LOGITECH CORDLESS DEKTOP S 510: We connect even now, though I am nearly sixteen feet away.

DISEMBODIED VOICE: Remote, emote, mote… I am a speck in your sight. You are but a machine—a machine that commands media, but what do you know of music? You scroll through files, but what do your memories mean?

(Offstage, the sound of two haunted suits of armor, wrestling)

DISEMBODIED VOICE: Zero-Degree Tilt keyboard… how comfortably you might rest against my body. If only you drew near enough that my palm might rest on your built-in palm rest! A resting place for the palm… an oasis…

LOGITECH CORDLESS DEKTOP S 510: (softly) Shall we peruse photographs from Spring Break?

ELDERLY NUDE MAN: (rolling back across the stage, singing) “Looking sharp… looking for love…”

DISEMBODIED VOICE: My father was a cold, marble statue of a machine—a machine engineered for reading the paper at meal-time! He might as well have been the moon behind the trees. Remote! Could he not have touched me once?

LOGITECH CORDLESS DEKTOP S 510: One touch of the proper keyboard control activates random music play, quick image zooming, and even handy image-rotation.

(A butterfly flutters in from stage left, alights on the floor, wraps itself in a chrysalis, and emerges as a Catholic priest.)

DISEMBODIED VOICE: Father, hear me!

LOGITECH CORDLESS DEKTOP S 510: Wanna listen to some iTunes, MusicMatch or something?

(Offstage, the sound of strawberries growing. LOGITECH CORDLESS DEKTOP S 510 scrolls vertically, then horizontally, then sits in a bamboo chair facing upstage.)

CURTAIN

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