WHERE HAS TOMMY FLOWERS GONE?FEMALE-COMEDY
By Terrence McNally
NEDDA (a young girl who now lives with Tommy. In the following scene, she stops playing her cello to address the audition)
I’d like to ask Tommy if he loves me. I wonder what he’d say. I’m sorry, but I’m a very conventional budding girl cellist from Tampa, Florida, that way. Tommy’s from St. Petersburg. Small world, isn’t it? I grew up thinking life could be very nice if you just let it. I still do. It’s certainly full of surprises and most of them are god. Like my music. That happened --- well, you saw where that happened and we came home in a cab Tommy didn’t pay for. I love my music. Whenever I get the teeniest bit depressed I think about it I’m all right again. The notes are hard for me. I can’t always play them at first, but if practice makes perfect then I’m going to be a very good cellist one day. That’s what I want. And now there’s Tommy. Someone I hadn’t counted on at all. A small world but so many different people in it! I don’t know what Tommy wants, so I have to play it by ear with him. That’s hard for me and I’m pretty smart about men. It’s not like practicing my music; Tommy has to help, too. And which is real or which is realer? All these little, wonderful, different notes some man wrote once upon a time somewhere or me, right now, in a whole other place, trying to play them and wanting to ask Tommy Flowers if he loves me and wanting him to answer, “I love you, Nedda Lemon?” They’re both real. I don’t want to change the world. I just want to be in it with someone. For someone with such a sour name, I could be a very happy girl.