Baring The Derriere Poem by gershon hepner

While you’re lying on a couch,
hiking skirt so you can to bare
your most delicious derrière,
I head for you, not Hedda Gabler,
because your derrière is marbler
as in this poem I now vouch.

You must be think I have lost
my marbles, but what’s wrong
with that? You know quite well I long
for every part of you, your lips ’n
breasts and thighs. I am no Ibsen—
don’t give me Norway’s permafrost.

Inspired by language Ben Brantley uses in his review of Mary-Louise Parker’s performance of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler”:
The forever fresh-faced Ms. Parker, one of our most delightful actresses, has traded in her usual air of easy, quirky spontaneity for the robotic petulance of an I-hate-everybody adolescent in a yearlong sulk. With her hair darkened, her face ghostly pale and her frame skeletal thin, her Hedda brings to mind a valley girl who’s given up cheerleading to be a goth because it’s way cooler and it matches the place her mind’s at now. Seen in this context, even the bizarre visual that opens the play — Hedda lying on a couch, her skirt hiked up and her seemingly bare derrière on view — fits into place. Hedda is mooning us. Now that’s really showing your contempt for the bourgeoisie. And of course this vampire housewife, unlike the frigid Heddas of the past, is quite amenable to sexual activity on the sly. Hey, she lets her old flame, Ejlert Lovborg (Paul Sparks) , get all the way to third base while her husband’s in the other room. That Mr. Sparks plays the brilliant, decadent Ejlert with the inflections of a ticked-off surfer dude only feeds into the whole “Twilight” effect.


1/26/09