Quote of the day, 11/13/06, ii

RADICAL STUDENT ACTIVIST: ...I said, would you like to get fucked?

ANNA: Do you always come on to single women like that?

RADICAL STUDENT ACTIVIST: Would you like it better if I bought you tall drinks with umbrellas? Told to you the stories of how hard a time my parents had during the war? Tell you how exciting I find foreign women, how they are the real women, not like the pale northern mädchens we have here at home? How absolutely bourgeois.

ANNA: I see. Why do you come here?

RADICAL STUDENT ACTIVIST: I don't come here for the overpriced drinks. I come here because of the bored western women who come here, who leave their tired businessmen husbands in the hotel rooms behind.

ANNA: You're cute. In a hostile way.

RADICAL STUDENT ACTIVIST: Fucking is a revolutionary act.

ANNA: Your hovel or my hotel?

...

RADICAL STUDENT ACTIVIST: There is something radical in two complete strangers committing biological necessity without having to give in to bourgeois conventions of love, without breeding to produce workers for a capitalist system, without the benediction of the church, the family, the bosses--

ANNA: I have something to confess to you. I lied to you.

RADICAL STUDENT ACTIVIST: About what?

ANNA: I'm not here on business. I don't specialize in corporate takeovers. I don't work on Wall Street. I only told you that because I thought that was what you wanted to hear...You just committed a revolutionary act with a first-grade schoolteacher who lives in low-income housing. And I'm tired. I think you should go.

RADICAL STUDENT ACTIVIST: And your husband?

ANNA: Not too loud. And he's not my husband. He's my brother. A maiden librarian for the San Francisco Public.

(As the Radical Student Activist starts to leave)

And by the way--the missionary position does not a revolution make.


--Paula Vogel, "The Baltimore Waltz"