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I had my first rehearsal today to play the role of Dr. Jim Bayliss in a production of All My Sons, the great Arthur Miller play. More info will be forthcoming, naturally, but since today was my first rehearsal and since I speak first in the play, I thought I’d type up a snippet from the top of the play, including the last bit of prefatory stage directions into the first lines of dialog:

DOCTOR BAYLISS is nearing forty. A wry, self-controlled man, an easy talker, but with a wisp of sadness that clings even to his self-effacing humor.
AT CURTAIN, JIM is standing at L., staring at the broken tree. He taps his pipe on it, blows through the pipe, feels in his pockets for tobacco, then speaks.

JIM. Where’s your tobacco?
KELLER. I think I left it on the table.

I may wear a bow-tie. Stay tuned!

There’s a nickname people have tried to give me a few times over the years. Ashworthy. I’ve never been fond of Ashworthy. I’ve never hated it and insisted people stop using it, but I’ve never been fond of it. And not just because as a nickname, it’s longer than the name it nicks, which goes against one of the main points of nicknames. In fact, one of my favorite nicknames of all time is Kevin Kevin Ashworth, as I was called by several lovely coworkers at Ab Initio Software in Lexington, Mass.

Perhaps one of the reasons I’ve never been fond of Ashworthy is that it’s not a name, it’s not a real thing, it just doesn’t exist. Or so I thought. This week I am reading the play Moonlight and Magnolias by Ron Hutchinson, which fancifully imagines how the screenplay for Gone With the Wind might have been created. The writer Ben Hecht is laughably unfamiliar with the big, famous book and must write a screenplay in just 5 days. At one point he gets the name Ashley Wilkes wrong and says Ashworthy. And there you have it. In print. The existence of Ashworthy.

Not that I want to be called that. Kevin is still fine. Kev is okay. K-dawg, K-Ash, Kevin Kevin Ashworth, dude. So many other things to call me first. Okay?

Do I call it The Cherry Hipster Orchard, The Hipster Orchard, or The Hipster Cherry Orchard?

In any case, the line is one I read once upon a time in a reading — my first foray into acting alongside professionals, in fact.

GAYEV. Dear, highly respected bookcase. I salute your existence. Yeah, man. For more than one hundred years, you have been copacetic to your witty ideals of Bettie Page and Freakonomics.

Okay, this time there is exactly one Google search result for “the three hipster sisters” — isn’t there some sort of internets prize for that?

Anyway, in what has suddenly become a brilliant, scintillating, continuing series of opening lines of hipster versions of Chekhov, I offer a first line to The Three Sisters, as heard in Silver Lake.

OLGA. It’s exactly a year ago that Father died, isn’t it? More cowbell.

At this moment in time (just after midnight, very early on June 24), if you search for the phrase “The Hipster Seagull” on Google, you get «No results found for "the hipster seagull"» and some alternative results, including something about Utah’s ironic hipsters now being outnumbered by Utah’s pretentious hipsters.

Wha?!?! You say there’s no hipster version of The Seagull? Dammit, there ought to be a hipster edition of Chekhov’s classic play! Hmmm. How would it start?

HOPPER. Mamie, why do you always wear black ironic tees?
MAMIE. I am in mourning for my lifestyle.

Feel free to add to this scintillating re-work. Please add brilliant Chekhovian dialog as it might be heard in Williamsburg or Silver Lake. Watch out, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies!