Pretidigitation - by Philip Powell - IGMS issue 14 audio

Prestidigitation - A Tale of Stolen Fingers

Written by Philip Powell

Illustration by Tom Barker

Performed by Philip Powell, Tommy Trull, Melanie Wallace, Jim McKeny, Billy Christiansen, Tom Barker

Verse bored me. It was my dirty little secret. E-Gads! My snobby friends would have shunned me. By randomly quoting snippets of Moliere I avoided their suspicion. But internally, verse made my eyes roll.

Until, I read "Le Bete" by David Hirson, wonderful play written in the late 80's that had rhyming verse. What was different? It was a modern playwright who had written something for a modern audience. I had been fooled all those years when reading Shakespeare or similar. I thought it was the verse that I didn't care for. But come to find out, the problem was all the anachonistic language. It got in the way of my comprehending the text. Once I actually understood what was being said, verse and I became fast friends.

This piece started out as a script for a NYC 24 hour film contest. The story had to be about a clown, at a party…oh…and it had to be in rhyming verse. So, I ripped out a few verses…but we ultimately went in a different direction. There it sat on my desktop for two years. Until a tag line hit me out of the blue one day. “A tale of stolen fingers” I mused “who would have to the most to lose if his fingers were stolen?” A magician I suppose. Hmmm..that sounds a bit like that piece I started a few years back.” The rhyming verse was already in place so I just went with it.

I learned a lot during the process. The confines were good, as I had to think very carefully about what I was doing. Every word was precious. I had 12 syllables per line, all of their accents had to hit the beat, it had to rhyme…oh, and manage to be funny. Prose never seemed so liberating.

* * * *

Prestidigitation - A Tale of Stolen Fingers

Written by Philip Powell

Performed by Philip Powell, Tommy Trull, Melanie Wallace, Jim McKeny, Billy Christiansen, Tom Barker

is available now in issue 14 of Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show