The Play's the Thing

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The whole trouble started when the Fuzhtian ambassador announced that he wanted to see a Broadway play.

Though I suppose you could equally well say that the trouble started when those first silent Fuzhtian probes snuggled coyly up behind our geosynchronous TV satellites and began shipping the signals back home. You might even go back further and say that it all started when Marconi’s first radio went on-line and began spewing electromagnetic radiation out into space for everyone to hear.

Oh, well, hell, let’s be honest. All of it really started with whoever the bunch of trouble-making Sumerians were who sat around on a rainy Sunday afternoon and invented entertainment.

Because that’s really what started the trouble: our vast entertainment industry, and the Fuzhties’ maniacal love for it.

For a simple example—and this isn’t supposed to be noised about—when the Fuzhtian ship landed outside the White House, the “Greetings and Joy to Humankind” line that will be going into the history books were actually the ambassador’s second words to the President. His first words were an expression of disappointment from his government that Johnny Carson was no longer hosting the Tonight Show. For those of you who’d always wondered why Carson suddenly came out of retirement right after that to do a one-month stint as guest-host, now you know.

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