There is a script for each of the characters who speak in Easter Everywhere: Lady Justice (Margaret Dragu), The Man On Camera (Eric Metcalfe), The Boy (Arthur Tashian) and Rock Talk Timmy (Graham Meisner). They have been woven together during the editing process.
The three scripts below have been written by Jeremy Todd. The fourth is comprised of appropriated excerpts from an online and unfinished book/memoir by an ex-drummer for the 13th Floor Elevators, Danny Thomas (now known as D. DeWitt Thomas). Please visit his website, The Elevator Society: Consortium to Save the Planet, to access current versions of this work and others.
Easter Everywhere Lady Justice Script
SCENE ONE
If you can, I want you to close your eyes and pretend you are watching a movie in the distant future. The screen is black.
You hear my voice speaking to you -- as if to you directly -- as if you are right here now with your eyes closed imagining yourself watching a black screen while listening to my voice:
"A terrible outbreak sweeps the Earth."
What else is new?
"The infected are like rabid animals, destroying their surroundings and each other."
Is this a horror picture?
"Any semblance of technology or culture attracts horrible fits of violence."
Just might involve a disgruntled artist, a religious fanatic, a paranoid schizophrenic, anybody really…
"The world is arrested within a state of perpetual emergency."
I've been blindfolded from the get-go and could tell you that.
"The cities of the world are in ruins. History is in flames."
This does seem to happen from time to time… Some have called it progress, others the natural order of things -- the entropic collapse and reformation of the universe. It's been prophesized from time to time as the final apocalypse, the rapture, the fat lady singing.
"We now believe the outbreak originates in the slums surrounding the Vancouver Winter Olympics. The North West is over run in days. Very few manage to hide from the consequences of the outbreak."
Ahhh, specificity -- the truth, so to speak, is out there.
"A strange collection of audio/visual recordings is discovered decades later on a remote Gulf Island. A solitary man appears throughout."
SCENE TWO
Too many people have felt in their hearts I don't exist. Too many people have believed this. There were too many disappointments and travesties as the scales kept braking down. Now finally I show myself. I am ready for my close-up! Lady Justice returns after the end of the world.
All those wretched statues, stories and paintings -- not one of them has ever really captured my luminosity. No one has really experienced me as I really am or could be. No Justice, no Peace.
Freedom gets bandied about when my name is mentioned but I've never seen it. Please tell me who truly understands what freedom is. Who has cradled it in their arms and really loved it? No one captures freedom and takes it out alive. Just try to gain it and survive to tell me about it. What's the cost? What is the burden of freedom?
When Freedom comes for you, when it takes you up into its secret realm, everything as it was will be imperceptible. Chop, chop.
SCENE THREE
Who is this Man On Camera?:
Who is this Man On Camera? He keeps wondering about his place in the scheme of things. Maybe he never got over being a child -- the centre of other people's lives -- who does? These kinds of delusions -- well, tend to get me all wrong.
Yes, he's called in the night. He's wept and whimpered waiting for me to show up. He used to think the sun went around him -- must've been be a nice feeling while it lasted.
He thinks he knows me. He thinks he should have me, as if I'd been his to begin with, as if I left him and should now return.
He tells himself fantastic stories from nowhere -- from no place. He thinks I've gone AWOL in his just world but I've never lived there -- the only companions he has are his imagination and memories -- and they're to close to separate. Hear him wailing as the sun comes up -- another day without me -- another night with his faulty plans.
Hear him spin his amazing yarns. He is afraid of his own desires. He is afraid to die. He is lost to the Kingdom of Heaven and he doesn't care to find it. He's looking for power. He's looking to convert reality. He wants control. He won't shut up.
SCENES FOUR
[Lady Justice Reads from Thoreau's Walden]
"I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put somethings behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings."
Easter Everywhere Man On Camera Script
SCENE ONE
You don't get vaccinated for this outbreak thing.
You just don't go get it.
You avoid it like the plague.
I followed the call of freedom.
I finally obeyed that voice from the West.
Besides, I've wanted off the grid my whole life.
The Woman and the Boy, well they took to the wilderness too.
No foaming at the mouth and eating corpses for those two.
And I said: "Come on in."
It gets lonely at the edge of the Earth.
You ask yourself, "How can it get so lonely?"
And then, after the end of everything, you find out.
She had to wind up here...
... cause if you wanna be free, this is where you go.
All I had to do was wait…
… near the tidal-pools, next to the abandoned something or other, on this little island of nothing.
I sat there in the afternoons and drank beer when I could scavenge it.
I used to sit there half-asleep with a beer and the darkness...
... only that old music the Boy played after figuring out the solar panels kept me awake.
That damned Easter Everywhere album.
SCENE TWO
I wanted to tell the world I found this Woman and Boy but the world didn't exist no more...
The telegraph office was closed for a permanent siesta.
I've been glad about it really.
I knew I'd go every night to feed them from my stash.
... and I knew they knew it.
I sat there and drank bourbon, when I could find some, and I shut my eyes...
I tried not to think of the city from before, or the city as I'd last seen it, rummaging for booze and food.
I knew where I was and what I was doing.
I just thought what a sucker I was.
I even knew she might never come to me in the night...
... but I sat there, grinding it out.
Once she waited until it was late ... and then she walked in out of the moonlight, smiling.
The Boy read us stories about some obscure Psychedelic Rock Band from 1960's Austin, Texas.
Before the history of the world slipped into oblivion, this kid prints out the online memoir of the ex-drummer for the 13th Floor Elevators.
Sometimes I've wanted to hurt him real bad over this - that fool and his obsession -- but I ain't no outbreak victim.
That ain't me Babe.
SCENE THREE
I never saw them in the daytime.
We seemed to live by night.
What was left of the day went away like a pack of cigarettes you smoked.
I treasured the cartons I found in abandoned cottages, boats, looted gas stations.
I don't know if others lived.
I've never bothered to find out.
All I've ever had to go on is my appetites and memories -- so what makes what?
I don't know what we've been waiting for.
Maybe we thought the world would end for us too.
Maybe we thought it was a dream...
... and we'd wake up with a hangover.
Every night I went to meet the Woman and the Boy.
How did I know they'd keep showing up?
I didn't.
What stopped them from taking the boat away from here?
Nothing.
How big a chump can you get to be?
I was finding out.
They'd come along like school was out...
... and everything else was just a stone you sailed at the sea.
One little lamp burned.
It was all right.
And the rain hammering like that on the window made it good to be in there.
It wasn't all a lie.
And I was on it too.
SCENE FOUR
We kept pretty much to ourselves.
We were on the run.
We went to places we never would've seen in our lives.
The smell of rotting flesh was horrible in the city.
And after awhile, we grew a little more sure of ourselves.
We drifted back to more familiar places, ballparks, movie theatres, bars and the racetracks.
Why not?
After all, there wasn't one chance in a million we'd bump into our past -- one chance in a gazillion.
When it seemed right, we'd blow into some ruins to find what we needed.
I wasn't bad at the game myself.
I was sure I had shaken the Old World loose, and I felt good.
If only that kid would shut up about that lousy band.
SCENE FIVE
Often it was like meeting somewhere on a date,
like in the times before.
There was still that something that got me.
A kind of magic or whatever it was.
We'd played it smart and forgotten nothing -- forgotten nothing except one thing.
The past was still with us in bits and pieces, like glass in your shoe or dirt in your coffee, always.
Oh God. Coffee…
The time before has remained in fragments of film, pixels, invisible emissions and mystery tape, taunting brain cells commandeered by long-dead forces, memories that were never ours to begin with.
Easter Everywhere Rock Talk Timmy Script
SCENE ONE
AALLLLLLRIGGGGHT!
Welcome to the west coast's favorite rock and roll rap session, Vancouver Rock Talk.
I'm your host, Rock Talk Timmy, shouting and shimmying across the cable access airwaves to keep you rockin'!
AALLLLLLRIGGGGHT!
I say it's time to stop workin' for the man every night and day. It's time to leave this terminal city behind!
We're going all the way back to '67 to enjoy the greatest psychedelic rock record of all time.
Now the 13th Floor Elevators were a group from Austin, Texas that lasted from late 1965 until 1969. They were, to my rock and roll mind, the most inspired, ideologically committed and unsung psychedelic rock band of all time. They had only limited commercial success before dissolving amid legal troubles and drug use.
Here's the first track off of the band's second and greatest effort, Easter Everywhere.
WHOOOOAAAAA!
SCENE TWO
AALLLLLLRIGGGGHT!
Welcome back to Vancouver Rock Talk. Lay down those raincoats and groove people!
I'm your host, Rock Talk Timmy, still taking it higher across those cable access airwaves!
AALLLLLLRIGGGGHT!
The International Artists record label in Houston signed the Elevators to a record contract and released the album The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators in 1966. It connected directly with the blossoming counterculture. With the release of Easter Everywhere in '67 their plan to abandon the modern West for a higher state of consciousness was gloriously announced.
Now Danny Thomas has an online memoir you can check out called "My Life In the Elevators".
WHOAAAOOO!
It's a fascinating glimpse into the unfinished utopic aspirations of the Elevators and their times. Whoa, did I just say that?
AALLLLLLRIGGGGHT!
SCENE THREE
AALLLLLLRIGGGGHT!
Welcome back to Vancouver Rock Talk. It's time to get involved and into it - with me, your host, Rock Talk Timmy.
AALLLLLLRIGGGGHT!
Drug and legal problems plagued them - but they always seemed to rise above it - just listen to the tunes man - like this one - "I've Got Levitation"!
Yeeeeeaaahhh!
Now in 69, the group's singer Roky Erickson admitted himself to a psychiatric hospital in order to avoid a prison term for drug possession. The band did not survive it but there music lives on man.
YEAAAHHH!
It's time once again to slap on that wax and be reborn my babies!
WHOOOOOOAAAAAAAH!
