A man enters stage right wearing a blue jumpsuit speckled with fake diamonds. His black hair is slicked back into a ponytail. Raises arms in air and shouts, "SHOWTIME!"

Rubs hands together and breathes into them. Bounces lightly on his legs, limbering up. Takes a full minute to do this.

He approaches the bench and kneels. Then he bows, his head touching the cold metal. He takes in four deep breaths. The spotlight makes his profile cast a shadow on the back stage wall.

He lays his hands on the bench and pats the metal affectionately. The sound reverberates sneakily through the bench, stage, and auditorium.

He pats the bench harder. He does it slightly rhythmically, BOOM pow pow, pow BOOM pow. It is out of time still, a cadenza of bench playing.

The man drums harder, his head still resting on the metal, absorbing each hit. A steady rhythm is discernable. The syncopation is funky. It is like hip-hop but hollower.

He gets wild with his bench drumming, tribal and thrusting. He sweats, and when his flailing right arm is raised, a pit stain is visible soaking through the blue suit.

The pace quickens. He is basically doing a drum roll now, sixty-fourth notes all running the length of the bench, stage, and auditorium.

Where one hands starts and where the vibrating bench ends is unknown. A crescendo of sound is reached, and at this apex, a tall black top hat glides out of the wings on stage left. Below the brim, two white furry feet. Three steps forward, one step back.

The man looks up, squats and continues drumming. His forehead is red and lined, sweating. The hat is coming towards him, attracted to the beat, the bench. The two furry feet hop forward to the rhythm.

The hat is one side of the bench, the man in the diamond-studded blue jumpsuit on the other. The man stands and approaches the hopping hat, moving to his the left, the crowd’s right, all the while somewhat hunched to keep up the drumming. Side by side now, the bench-drumming man and the gyrating hat. They bounce in rhythm together.

In one seamless motion the hat pops up in the air, off the now-displayed rabbit and right on to the man’s head. More dancing.

The rabbit does a back flip. The man does a back flip. They do the twist and some chorus line dancing. All is well and happy on stage until the rabbit smiles, showing a row of yellowed teeth, sharp and diseased-looking.

The man smiles, too. He has the same style teeth. Now both rabbit and man stand motionless, smiling sickly smiles, breathing heavily like actors in a musical after a tune.

The man sits down on the bench, and the rabbit quickly hops up too. They sit. Then they both bend forward and open their mouths as far they can go. They appear to be silently screaming, paralyzed in a dentist’s chair position.

The man and rabbit stay as they are, sitting on the metal bench for a full minute.

Then the man in the blue jumpsuit starts drumming again with his hands. The rabbit nods to the rhythm, his dark yellow teeth moving with each movement of his furry neck.

The man plays the same rhythm he had played before. He is excited by it, again sweating and concentrating. The rabbit starts hopping up and down on the bench.

Both the man and rabbit then pause, wink at one another, and then spit loudly. The front row gets sprayed with saliva and two hard objects. A young couple in the front, after whipping rabbit spit from their clothes, discovers that two sets of dentures are in their laps. They turn and raise the fake yellow dentures triumphantly to the rest of the audience. The man and rabbit smile Colgate grins.

The rabbit bows. The man bows and uses the rabbit as handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his brow as it sits like a cat on his lap. He strokes his rabbit with one hand and uses his other to wave to the ecstatic crowd.

The man adjusts his hat and puts his forefinger and thumb into the rabbit’s ears and takes out another black top hat.

He tosses the newfound hat to the young couple up front for being such good sports about the spitting thing. He waves again and then kisses the rabbit’s head. He kisses like he is kissing a lover not a pet. His lips press hard between the rabbit’s ears, and the creature squints its eyes at the force. He adds his tongue, bathing the white fluffy hair.

The man in the blue jumpsuit on stage seems to be almost chewing the rabbit’s head.

The man suddenly stops and looks contemplatively at the crowd. His eyes are a dark shade of green. The reflection of the stage lights make it appear that two swamp puddles are glistening by either side of his nose. He looks childish, like he is playing dress up in his diamond-studded jumpsuit. He nervously twists at one of the studs as if it wear a cheap dial.

He kisses the rabbit’s head once more, and then sticks the whole head in his mouth and bites. The snap of the spine is heard.

The man gets to his knees and places his chin and jaw on the metal bench. The loud crunching of the rabbit head reverberates through the bench, stage, and auditorium.

The man chews what is left and swallows. The torso of the rabbit body bleeds and pools out. The whole crowd can hear the sound of the blood moving like a tired stream.

The man smiles with pink fur blood on his teeth, his REAL teeth, and picks up the rabbit body. He stands of the bench and takes four deep breaths.

The man then uses the body to as a drumstick. He pounds the metal bench with the rabbit body. The thudding is wet-sounding and primal, like it should be made by a synthesizer, but it is not.

The man keeps drumming his bench. The remaining blood in the rabbit speckling his blue jumpsuit. He looks patriotic now.

The man picks up the pace, adds wild syncopation and little jazzy fills wherever he can.

The limbs of the rabbit get too loose. They launch into the crowd. The man reaches his apex and then stops abruptly. He takes the zipper on the rabbit’s upper chest and zips downward.

Out emerges Hope. It is Hope in a physical form. It is a beige light that is hard to look away from. It is sexy looking but not slutty. It is large but not overpowering.

Hope dances to the new rhythm the man in the diamond-studded blue jumpsuit comes up with. Hope is a great dancer.