“No — Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”
–F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
After the parties stopped sometime in 1922, nobody paid much attention to the gaudy mansion sitting at the edge of Long Island Sound, on the utmost tip of West Egg. It was a mad time, back then, a crazy swinging time that moved so fast it was easy to get distracted. Besides, no one knew much about the man whose house it was. So the car loads of politicians, movie stars, and college students that used to parade up and down those marble steps found other parties to fill with their sparkling laughter and their appetites for cocktails and jazz.
Meanwhile, nobody came to claim the rambling mansion or knock it down, and every year it got a little shabbier.
Then 1929 hit, and the party was really and truly over– not only in the house at the tip of West Egg, but everywhere.
Now it is the final year of Prohibition in the benighted year of our Lord 1933. The papers say that unemployment is the worst it’s ever been, that one in four Americans is out of work, but you don’t need a newspaper to tell you that the Depression is getting worse every year. Roosevelt might be president now, but this is New York in the image of Hoover: breadlines that stretch for blocks, street vendors with holey shoes selling the same types of apples on every corner, aluminum and cardboard shacks filling the dirt plains of Central Park.
Somewhere in Hoover’s New York, Marjorie Perkins hopes that you can find her daughter Ruby, who’s been missing for the past four days. Ruby’s had a hard time of it lately– who hasn’t?– ever since her husband’s wealth vanished in the crash. Then, in the summer of 1930, he left one night for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. Ruby’s lived in her mother’s tenement apartment ever since. The past few weeks, before she disappeared, Marjorie says that Ruby had taken to long walks heading God knows where, vanishing for hours at a time, and then talking funny when she came back. Something about a garden, overflowing towers of champagne, and a green light shining in the darkness.
Can you find her? And if you do– can you bring her back?
Hosted and narrated by:
Chip (JackOfTheLighter)
Completed 11/06/16.
Scenes played: 6
License: Community License
