Kennedy's Children
By Robert PatrickA smoke-filled New York City bar on Valentine's Day in 1974 brings together a remarkable cast of characters who relive their experiences of the past decade. As each character recalls his or her shattered dream, lost innocence, or disillusionment in America in the post-Camelot era following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, there is a dark and corrosive glimpse into each of their tragic lives.
CARLA:
I wanted to be a sex goddess. And you can laugh all you want to. The joke is on me, whether you laugh or not. I wanted to be one - one of them. They used to laugh at Marilyn when she said she didn't want to be a sex goddess, she wanted to be a human being. And now they laugh at me when I say, "I don't want to be a human being, I want to be a sex goddess." That shows you right there that something has changed, doesn't it? Rita, Ava, Lana, Marlene, Marilyn - I wanted to be one of those. I remember the morning my friend came in and told us all that Marilyn had died. And all those obys were stunned - rigid, literally, as they realized what had left us. Like a flame going out, like a moth fluttering away, like the moon not rising full on the proper night... death, bone-white death. I mean, if the world couldn't support Marilyn Monroe, then wasn't something desperately wrong? And we spent the rest of the damned sixties finding out what it was. We were all living together, me and three gay boys that picked me up when I ran away, in this loft on East Fifth Street, before it became dropout heaven - before anyone even said "dropout" - way back even when commune was still a verb. We were all... old movie buffs, sex-mad - you know, the early sixties. And then my friend, this sweet little queen, he came in and passed out tranquilizers to everyone, and told us all to sit down, and we thought he was just going to tell us there was a Mae West double feature on somewhere, and he said - he said - he said, "Marilyn Monroe died last night." And all the boys were stunned, but I felt something sudden and cold in my solar plexus, and I knew then what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be the next one. I wanted to be the next one to stand radiant and perfected before the race of man, to shed the luminosity of my beloved countenance over the struggles and aspirations of my pitiful subjects. I wanted to give meaning to my own time, to be the unattainable luring love that drives men on, the angel of light, the golden flower, the best of the universe made womankind, the living sacrifice, the end! (In ecstacy.) Shit!
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