Pinocchio

The setting for Pinocchio is a table in an Italian restaurant where Gloria and Pinocchio are having their first date.  When Pinocchio tells her he is a puppet she confesses that she is nearsighted and didn’t wear her glasses.  He says his eyes were carved and then painted and he is a puppet who has come to life.  He starts telling the woman about being a piece of wood and being sold to an old character named Geppetto who made puppets.  He explains that all inanimate objects are alive and conscious to some degree and that he became more and more conscious as Geppetto carved him.  When Pinocchio’s nose kept growing, Geppetto kept cutting the end off, saying that he was going to be a wicked boy and a born liar.  He tells her that when Geppetto carved his mouth he laughed at him and stuck out his tongue.  With his newly-carved hands he ripped off his wig, and when Geppetto finished his feet he kicked him in the balls.  When Geppetto taught him to walk he ran out the door and down the street, chased by Geppetto who was arrested by the police and put in jail.  Pinocchio tells her that he got hungry and found an egg, but the egg cracked open and a chicken crawled out and flew away.  He says the chicken is an allegory of the soul trapped in the body.  Then, Pinocchio says, there was a storm and he pounded on the door of an old woman and asked for shelter but she poured a pot full of piss on him and he ran until he stepped in a pot hole, falling on his face, and a cat ate his feet.  He managed to crawl back to Geppetto’s shop and found a talking cricket who spoke to him as if he was telling him the secret of life.  But when the cricket started singing, Pinocchio says, he squashed him with a hammer.  Geppetto then returned from jail and cleaned Pinocchio up and carved new feet for him and started talking to him as if he were his son.  When Pinocchio promised Geppetto he would go school, the old man sold his only winter coat to buy a spelling book.  Pinocchio tells the woman that he sold the book to get a ticket to a puppet show so he could socialize with his own kind.  When she questions his actions he says that meat people like her don’t understand that everything is alive and conscious.  She says she wants to go but he goes on about consciousness perhaps being an illusion and imagination creating love and suffering.  She says all she wanted was spaghetti and meatballs and a glass of wine, but when she tries to leave he grabs her arms and tells her that everybody is faking and that a blue-haired fairy once loved him but he ran away and she died of grief.  The woman asks him to let go of her arms and bewails the fact that she always ends up with weirdos and losers.  Pinocchio apologizes and tells her that he can’t lie or his nose starts to grow.  He says people don’t want to hear the truth; they want puppet shows, comforting lies.  She leaves and Pinocchio says that puppets have wooden heads and no hearts,  just like people.  The truth, he says, doesn’t make you free; it just isolates and then kills you.  He says he misses that damned cricket.