the elevator

The brand-new MPAC elevator is now complete and boy is she a beauty. Her brushed metal doors gleam like golden door-shaped trumpets and she offers speedy, convenient access to multiple floors. The elevator is the quintessential American invention, as everyone knows that all Americans are wide, stupid, lazy and fall down elevator shafts a lot.

Yes, yes… Pure American, right down to the obnoxious loud noises. At every floor the elevator lets loose with The Piercing Buzzer, which shatters all crystal goblets and teeth in a five mile radius. If the end of the world is like a quiz show, this thing will be there to tell all the little contestants we’re outta time! Most elevators are satisfied with a pleasant ‘ding’ (a slightly flat E, I believe, for music nerds) to signify a floor has been reached.

No. MPAC has trained this baby differently. The new elevator wants all riders to associate elevator riding with intense aural pain. You begin to dread going up two floors because then your brain will be forced out of your nose twice.

Perhaps the abhorrent buzzer results from the generalization that all disabled/handicapped/physically retarded people are also deaf, but I doubt this is the case. The school actually doesn’t want us to use the new elevator. Short from flooding the space with water every time you hit a button, the best thing to discourage students from using the elevator would be to make it hurt. A lot.

It’s kind of like that show The Chamber, only without the flames licking bare flesh. Also unlike the show, in MPAC no one cares about your stress quotient. Do not speak of your unbearable stress quotient to theater majors, as you will likely entertain a creative death shortly thereafter. They will offer you no pity, as most theater majors are so busy they manage only to find sleep while blinking.

Ok, so the elevator is nothing like The Chamber, but what a show, eh? With Millionaire you are pretty much guaranteed $32,000 just for showing up, but in The Chamber you are tortured for seven minutes and wind up with fifteen grand if you’re lucky.

Probably the worst torture, extending far beyond the flames, 150 mph winds and low oxygen levels, is looking at the host John McEnroe’s unshaven face. It’s like John fell out of his closet one morning and stumbled into the street where FOX hijacked his body for the latest non-craze of unreality tv. I want to see at least one contestant come out of the Chamber, spit in John’s eye and demand he “get a !@^#%$! razor.”

John McEnroe, whose last name has been temporarily revoked due to the Enron scandal, and will only be reinstated when McDonald’s saves the day by buying out Enron.

Oh John, are you going places.