“The Highly Regarded, VeRnerable, Well-Well-Well Established Ortizes; Or: Milkcrate Bandstand”

Milkcrate Bandstand: A Background

The Players:

Maria (Community College English Professor)………….…….MC, Dancer, “Uh…Um…Well” Stand-Up Comedian

Martín (Union Plumber) ………………………………………….…...Audience Member

Brother Dan (Physical Therapist)…………………………………..Trumpet Player, Juggler, Entertainer

Megin (University Psychology Professor/Researcher)…….Dramatic Reader of Poems

Brother Dave (Grocery Store Employee)………………………..Audience Member, Heckler

Joe (Delivery Package Handler/Student)………………..……..Ventriloquist

Joelle (Bike Courier/Student)…………………………………….….Window Presenter, Stand-Up Comedian of Bad Puns

Inaugural Milkcrate Bandstand:

The Talent Show

July 24th, 2020, 10:15ish PM

The San Telmo Treehouse, Chicago, IL

“Do you want a trumpet introduction?” Brother Dan asks me.

I do, indeed.

“Hold on, I gotta learn one really quick. Give me like three minutes.” I sort out the first window sign to start the evening affair. “Here’s one from ‘Spongebob Squarepants’,” Dan notes, equally as perplexed as amused. “That seems fitting.”

It’s a Friday night in late July. Maria is piping lounge music through the speakers on the first-floor porch, and a parade of Nino-Rota-esque tunes mambo across the backyard; an apt match to the amber strings of glass bulbs hanging from the walls, the fence, the pear tree. We are inside the lounge, but the lounge is outside. Maria is at the mosaic-tiled table, sorting raffle tickets next to a bowl of sangria.

“Pick one!” she keeps telling us. They’re all individualized with clip-art and crayon, with a fortune-cookie voice (“Win, Prosper, Flourish!”)—there’s one that’s sequential, one that’s 666, one that has about thirty numbers; one that is the well-known phone number of a local flooring company, one that just has a bunch of “x”s. She’s made a part of the ticket that tears off and reads, “PRESENT to redeem PRIZE!” in her childlike scrawl.

Three minutes pass. Dan begins his trumpeting and I march out, holding the main Ortiz window, settling it up against the a-frame of a ladder (“Every place has a lot of one thing—this building, it’s ladders”), Megin’s projector light beaming through it and the shadow casting an enlarged image onto the garage wall behind it.

“The Highly Regarded, VeRnerable, Well-Well-Well Established Ortizes,” the window reads.

“What’s ‘vernerable’?” Brother Dave asks.

“Are you gonna start your speech?” comes Maria’s voice from inside the garage. “I’m getting hot in here!”

“I was waiting for you!”

I give a quick thanks for being here and participating and all that good stuff to a backyard audience of five, excluding Maria sweating in velour leggings in the garage. Without further ado, I introduce my best friend.

I start the song for her—"Ooh La La” by Goldfrapp—the music streaming out the raised first-story porch, and she emerges from the side of the garage, sunglasses obscuring her eyes, her hair in two braids, her velour-legging legs strutting into the yard with a black satin cape lined in red crushed velvet shrouding her shoulders. She starts her dance, swinging a lit bulb on a string as both her prop and dance partner. Moves, folks—she’s got ’em. She’s hopping on two feet straight in the air, then sliding backwards on the piece of plywood we’re calling a stage. Before long, the light is tossed aside, the cape is dropped, and Maria has miraculously revealed herself have arms that move in an unearthly way, and where once her hands were, are now two metal clips. I laugh—she’s strung the velvet rope she sticky-fingered from West Fest years ago through her sweatshirt arms; I was there a decade gone when this move was invented. Her back and shoulders move in a comically exaggerated form; she has morphed into a sort of two-armed octopus. She’s squatting low and her back has a horizontal spine that is undulating with her slowly waving arms. It is a wonder to behold.

And so starts the first San Telmo Treehouse talent/variety show: Milkcrate Bandstand.

MILKCRATE BANDSTAND (“Funny, cuz that’s the one thing this thing lacks”)

August 8TH, 10:15ish PM

The San Telmo Treehouse, Chicago, IL

The Players:

Maria (Community College English Professor)………….…….MC, Baton Twirler/Dancer, Singer

Brother Dan (Physical Therapist)…………………………………..Trumpet Player, Juggler, Entertainer

Megin (University Psychology Professor/Researcher)…….Dramatic Reader of Poems

Brother Dave (Grocery Store Employee)………………………..Audience Member, Heckler, Feats of Strength Participant

Joe (Delivery Package Handler/Student)………………..……..Guitar Player/Singer

Joelle (Bike Courier/Student)…………………………………….….Window Presenter, Detective, Harmonica Player/Singer

“Shall I begin the fanfare?” Dan asks.

“Not yet!” I turn to my friend. “Maria!” I cry, “Il vino!”

“O, yes!” she responds. “Let’s go!”

She follows me into the basement, and we grab the grocery store shopping basket her brother has “borrowed” from his work that he’s using as a laundry bin. We go into the fridge and get one of several bottles of wine and place it in the basket, and Maria ceremoniously marches up the stairs and into the yard, while Dan begins the trumpeting signalling the start of the event. She pulls the bottle out of the basket triumphantly, her rabbit to display to the audience. She graciously pours the wine.

The show begins.

“Crime Time 3041: Thrifty and Loving It”

(The detective slide show: The window, my screen; the audience, my team.)

Narrator: “Listen up, cadets, and listen good. Snap your globe probes out of your fangled minicomputers and back into reality. Your mom will like your post when she likes your post. Pay attention now. We’ve got a real wacko on our hands. A goof. A goof of the worst kind. A disgusting sick-hat of human material. Notepads out.”

“Frank Buchanan. Top right. Fifty-four years old. [“Fifty-four?! He looks eighty-four!” Dave exclaims. Maria hushes him with a “She said, ‘He hasn’t aged well!”] In the past, he’s been accused of (and I quote) ‘taking a dooker on the snooker.’ If you don’t know what this is, I can’t spell it out for you. Check with your cool cousin; I can’t waste my time. But this new vein of unlawfulness Frank has dipped his wretched big toe into, this, team, is much worse.”

“Frank, team members, is what’s known as a ‘tightwad’…a cheapo to a criminal degree. Here’s a photo snapped by one of our under-covers two years ago. There’s Buchanan in the blue jacket. Haggling the price of used books at a no-haggle market. We picked him up hours later, but had to let him go for legal reasons.

“Legally, we can’t do shit.”

“In 1984, he promised his grandpappy a cross-country train trip. This is what Papa Buchanan got. Buchanan Jr. Jr. built this rig off of scraps he found in alleys and gutters. He borrowed the train from a neighbor who wishes to remain anonymous at this time. Frank is having fun. As you can see, no one else is.”

“1978. Young Frank’s Tinder profile. What this young man could tell us of the monster he’d become.”

“This is Sāv-Mōr Deli. Notice the bottom shelf on the left-hand side has been emptied dry. Frank had been there. Two-for-one on raisin bread. Cleaned the whole place out. The manager had to shut down the shop early so as not to disappoint raisin bread to-be-purchasers.

“The to-be-purchasers? O, the to-be-purchasers were hot! Hot with wrath.”

“Last slide. Last June. Frank’s last known sighting. Smuggling himself into the airplane bathroom saying he forgot his keys in there. Got a free trip to somewhere, the rat. His thrift knows no bounds. Eyes wide, team. Exhibit diligence!

We must catch! This! Scoundrel!”

The Windows:

Original storm windows from the house.