The tape is about mourning and memory. My second tape, Cut the Parrot, was inspired by the last scene in A Prayer for Nettie. Albert Smith and I perform a little skit which breaks the cycle of piety and hope - we do this after we put out the cat. Our successful improvisation gave me the idea of making of a comedy with Albert, and I persisted in that idea even after he died. Cut the Parrot became a tape about Albert's death, not an elegy, a wake.
People tell stories, they joke, they find meaning in the most trivial things.
The characters move between Albert living and Albert dead, then they shift to the lives and deaths of their loved ones. They pray, they sing, they tell war stories, and they go on. The wake creates a space of carnivalesque release, making death large and loud and real, within the safety of a fictive narrative. My favourite scene in Cut the Parrot is a dialogue with Susan in which she turns the tables on me. After Brenda is the story of man called Pierre.