The old woman walked onto the stage wearing her robe, pajamas, and slippers. As the patrons watched her climb the steps, they didn’t know what to think. Who was this old hag?
She stood in front of the crowd and looked at all the young people staring back at her. “You’re probably all wondering what I’m doing here,” she told the crowd, putting her hands into the pockets of her robe. They hoped she wasn’t going to pull out a gun and kill them all.
The faces in the crowd reminded the old woman of Simon Cowell before Susan Boyle’s first performance on Britain’s Got Talent. They didn’t know what to expect, and they were already judging her based on her appearance.
“To be honest, I don’t know why I’m here myself. I had thought about what I could do to make you all laugh. Standing up here and just belting out a stream of vulgarities came to mind – that seems to be what humors a lot of you these days. Yes, one good F-bomb dropped in the middle of a sentence or a continuous stream of them can send some of you into uproarious laughter. But no, I didn’t want to sing, ‘Fuck damn shit crap, oh what a relief it is!’ to grab your attention. I don’t feel comfortable speaking those words.”
The old woman lowered her head and then looked out into the crowd. “To be honest, I’m surprised you’re even looking at me now. I gotta tell you, young people, in all honesty, as I stand before you now, I have to wonder if I’m going through a midlife crisis.”
A young man snickered in the front row. “Mid-life,” he elbowed his buddy. “More like end of life crisis.”
“You know,” the old woman said, looking at the gorgeous young man and pausing momentarily to stare directly into his eyes, “If I were 40 years younger I’d be hitting on you. Now I just feel like hitting you.”
Some people laughed.
“Ha! Appropriate laughter. Thank you!”
She shuffled her slippers, seemingly lost in thought as everyone glanced at each other, waiting.
“On may way over here tonight after I crawled out of my bed,” she continued, “I thought about all the things I wanted to do before my life ended and since I’ve always been a closet comedian, I decided it was time to come out of the closet. The reason I’m wearing this robe is that my clothes, who have been listening to my comedic witticisms for the past half century, are too ashamed to be seen in public with me.”
The old woman sauntered back and forth across the stage as squinty-eyed, cross-browed patrons wished she would just disappear.
“You’ll all be here one day, you know, maybe not necessarily on this stage, but at this stage in your life. You’ll look in the mirror and the image staring back at you will have aged 50 years faster than the image you expected to see, and you’ll ask your mirror, ‘Who IS that?’ And then you’ll wonder why you’re talking to your mirror.”
The old woman stopped and stared out into the crowd. “You can see yourself – kind of, because the vision isn’t what it used to be, and you find yourself grateful for those blurred lines, because you can pretend you have no wrinkles – if you can’t see those lines, maybe they’re not there anymore. It doesn’t matter, though, because other people won’t even look at you. They’ll look through you, and you’ll feel invisible.”
She continued pacing.
“I wanted to warn you about what to expect when you get old.”
The old woman took her hands out of her pockets and brought them up to the lapel on her robe. “Tonight, Ladies and Gentlemen, I will leave my mark on this stage, not by peeing on it, though at my age that is a possibility and you might have expected that from me, but by doing something a little different.”
She paused briefly and then said, “After I show you what I’m talking about, I’m going to come out into that crowd and I’m going to get personal. They say you’re only as old as you feel, so after I finish feeling all of you, I’m going to tell you how old you are.”
Before the eyes of everyone seated popped out of their heads, the old woman disrobed.
And the crowd roared with laughter. Because under the robe, the old woman wore a tight skin-colored pair of pajamas shaped like the naked body of a well-endowed 19-year-old girl. She walked down the stage and grabbed the gorgeous young guy and pulled him up onstage. The old woman started dancing and twerking with him as she sang, Robin Thicke’s, Blurred Lines – “You know you want it…everybody get up!”
The crowd loved it. Miley Cyrus ran up the aisle naked, rolling her wrecking ball in front of her and started twerking along with the old woman. And as the night drifted away, you could see the old woman running her hands up and down the bodies of all the young people in the crowd and you could hear her shout out numbers, 22, 33, 27… she had lived her dream and she died a happy old lady.
Want to know about the old hag who wrote this little sketch? Click HumorOutcasts’ February, 2014 Writer of the Month!