Preview of my script for "Instant Theater", where the audience is the show

We start with the beginning line ("It's official") and end line ("it's a tricky business"), decided upon at the end of the previous theater session, and come up with an original script. Actors volunteer to read, sight unseen.  So here's mine.

LUCKY AND UNLUCKY



ALBIE
It’s official!!! I am officially the unluckiest person on earth.
MINTY
Oh boy, here we go again. What happened now?
ALBIE
Okay, so I was at the Strand today....
MINTY
More books? You need more books?

ALBIE
No, actually, I wanted to buy a calendar and now that it’s way past New Years, they practically give them away, and I figured I’d pick up a beautiful art calendar real cheap, and then I started looking through the bargain books...
MINTY
As usual. How many times do I have to tell you, it’s not a bargain if you don’t need it in the first place.
ALBIE
You just don’t get it, do you. Listen, and I quote: "Spend all you have for loveliness, spend it and never count the cost".
MINTY
Right, it was easy for Sara Teasdale to say, she didn’t have to walk around stacks and stacks of dusty old books.
ALBIE
How do you know Sara Teasdale didn’t have stacks and stacks of LOVELY old books ? Forget about that for now, let me tell you what happened.
　
MINTY
Okay, so what happened as you were plowing through stacks and stacks of loveliness?
ALBIE
You won’t believe what I found....you just won’t believe it.
　
　
　
MINTY
An uncensored, original, signed copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover with intact dust jacket stamped "banned in Boston"?
ALBIE
Are you going to let me finish? No, better than that. Way better!
　
MINTY
The Gutenburg Bible, portable edition?
　
ALBIE
No. Okay, I’ll tell you: Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s "The First Circle."
　
MINTY
.....................................
ALBIE
Speechless, aren’t you?
　
MINTY
Speechless, I mean, Solzhenitsyn. Uh, he wrote uh, The Gulag Arpeggio?
　
ALBIE
Oh my good lord, the Gulag Archipelago. Nobel Prize? Remember?
　
MINTY
Okay, archipelago, same difference. But it sounds like you were lucky, you found some hidden treasure, right?
　
　
ALBIE
Right! Talk about uncensored? This was the uncensored version about his life in a Russian prison camp, and Stalinist repression and torture and stuff like that. So then I hop on the N train to get home, and I’m like, wow, there’s a seat! Lucky, right? Well, you know how it is, just when you think you got a seat, you find out the reason why it’s empty. Like the time I got on the train and half the car was empty, and I’m like, oh great, a seat! And then I find out why. There’s a passed out bum and I can’t smell him because I have a really bad head cold and I’m the only one who isn’t trying to change cars at the next stop.
MINTY
Is that what happened?
　
ALBIE
No, this time there was a Starbucks Grande spilled under a two seater, and a grande puddle of coffee in front of the seat, so naturally I couldn’t sit down. What a freakin’ mess! Some guy was sitting in one of the seats, a Lubavitcher dude. So I knew he was getting off at Atlantic Avenue, and I figured I would make my move then, because there wasn’t as much coffee in front of him. I was praying that no one else would sit in that empty spot. Sure enough, at Atlantic Avenue, I make my move. I start reading The First Circle. A great big book, with a ripped dust jacket, great blurb, author bio and all that. My feet, hovering six inches off the floor to keep out of the mess. And then you won’t believe what happened. I DROPPED THE BOOK. Right into the puddle of coffee.
MINTY
(AD LIB REACTION)
ALBIE
Can you believe it? I had to wipe off the coffee with the book cover, and for the first time in my life, I LITTERED ON THE SUBWAY. I left the cover in the puddle and kept on reading.
That beautiful dust jacket. Gone. Now am I the unluckiest person in the world or what?
MINTY
If I had to choose between the N train and the gulag, I’d say........ it’s a tricky business.