The play is set in an
endearingly old-fashioned restaurant in a small town in Eastern Ontario. The restaurant has chrome bar
stools, booths upholstered in naugahyde, and a big hand-painted mural running
along one side of the room, depicting cows and goats grazing happily on a
riverside meadow.
The restaurant is run by an
octogenarian Greek man named John who, though he owns a prosperous sheep farm a
few miles east of town, regards the restaurant both as a way of keeping busy—a form
of exercise—and as a place of warm social interaction. He also prides himself on making a
great breakfast.
Like a lot of Greeks, John is
nothing if not hospitable. To
everybody who enters the place, he sings out, from his grill at the back,
either a hearty “Welcome Home!” or, if the customer is a single man—one of his
breakfast regulars—his best greeting of all: “Good morning, Mr. President!”
On this particular morning,
there are only two people in the restaurant: John and his waitress, a big strapping
woman who doesn’t have much to do since John usually brings out the food
himself and also collects the money for it from the customers.
As the play opens, a heavy,
middle-aged woman with puffy bleached blonde hair, and wearing a wildly
patterned green and yellow shirt and long beige shorts, enters the restaurant
and makes slowly and with great deliberation for a booth. On her left arm is a bandage which
looks new and which she presses steadily with her right hand. John can’t greet her with his
usual “Welcome Home!” because he has never seen her before.
WOMAN (addressing anyone who hears her): Doctors! Always taking blood!
JOHN: Tests?
WOMAN: They
just take blood!
JOHN: Where are you from?
WOMAN: A farm
up north of here. I don’t own
it. I just rent it.
JOHN (nodding encouragingly): Fresh air.
WOMAN:
Yeh. And when it rains, the
sky opens up. If you hold up a
bucket, the rain fills it in a couple of seconds.
Unlike any of John’s regulars,
the woman picks up the menu and peruses it with great care. John stands at her table, patiently waiting
for her order.
WOMAN (carefully, precisely): I’ll have one
egg, some bacon and toast.
JOHN: White or whole wheat?
WOMAN: Whole
wheat.
JOHN: Do you
want potatoes?
WOMAN (looking blank): Potatoes?
JOHN (patiently):
Home fries.
WOMAN (brightening):
Oh sure, okay.
John shuffles back to his
grill and in a few moments, while the waitress stands disconsolately at the
front window, brings the woman her breakfast. She falls upon it gratefully and eats heartily.
WOMAN (looking up happily): Your bacon is just
the way I like it!
JOHN (smiling):
Not too greasy, not too hard.
Would you like some jam?
WOMAN (with touching enthusiasm): I would love
some jam!
John goes to fetch it and, on
the way back to her booth, drops the little plastic coffin of red jam on the
floor. The woman looks at it. John looks at it. The waitress turns to look at it.
JOHN (embarrassed): I can’t pick it up. If I do, I’ll fall. I’ll get you another one.
WAITRESS (relieved to have a task to perform): I’ll pick it up!
John fetches a new, second
jam and brings it back to the woman.
The waitress scoops up the fallen jam and is about to carry it over to a
refuse container near the counter.
WOMAN (addressing the waitress): I’ll
take that one too!
WAITRESS (turning to face her): You really want it?
WOMAN: Yes. Yes.
(curtain)
