Love Me Tinder

 

Follow the yellow brick road.

 Naomi is there when I arrive, sipping red wine.  She tells me of a time when she was in a doctor’s consultation room in a faraway country, which she sprayed red with fountains of blood from a cut on her neck. There was so much blood over the floor that she slipped in it.  The doctor, who had stepped out of the room, came back into a scene from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Naomi’s life is like a horror film – for other people.

We start writing.  We did good work last week, and we both feel inspired when we read it back.  It’s unusual, and not as broadly comic as the other parts of the play, but we’re okay with that.  We have soliloquies and talk of predestination, and it’s all set in a crummy place in a melancholic seaside resort in winter – it feels like we’re dabbling a bit in the genre of magic realism and that this is a play that’s writing itself.  I mention that I had recently watched scenes from a TV production of Don Giovanni, and that I had been struck by the bit when Mr G gets dragged down into Hell by a legion of writhing red demons, played by sexy women in tight cat suits.  Could we do something like that in our play, I wonder?  Naomi comes up with something inspired, probably just to humour me, and we crack on.  

By a staggering coincidence, one of Naomi’s work friends is in the pub, on a first date.  They matched on Tinder, apparently.  Naomi explains how she borrows her friend’s phone sometimes to idly find for her friend a Tinder match, but that she feels constantly anxious when she uses the app because she keeps second guessing herself. Is it right for good, and left for bad? Yes, that’s right, another friend will say.  Okay, just making sure, says Naomi.  But then a few swipes later she’ll doubt herself again – is it left, or right?  This is the modern world’s cupid’s arrow.  This is the twenty-first century.  I wonder what happens to all those rejected smiling, hopeful young men, the ones who were swiped left.  There was a wreath of poppies left by the memorial along the riverside, and I feel a moment’s shame.

Later, Naomi starts singing along to Meatloaf’s Paradise by the Dashboard Light.  Shh, she says, listen to this bit, it’s a good bit.  I listen.  Obviously, the bar staff have finally got bored with Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, and are giving Bat Out of Hell a spin.  People start coming into the pub. Life returns.  It’s Bristol.  We are night people.  You can’t keep us in.