Marg Szkaluba (Pissy's Wife) is a "one-woman country and western musical". It is the story of Marg, self proclaimed "hard woman" who marries an abusive lout named Pissy Szkaluba when she gets pregnant by him at the age of 16, and then suffers years of abuse and self doubt until, pushed to the extreme of self loathing, she breaks free. The play consists of her telling her story in a scummy small town redneck bar, and singing songs about her life and eventual emancipation. She does this because, as she states at the end of the play, "if we don't tell each other stories about what's happened to us, we ain't gonna learn anything or go anywhere."

People often ask if Pissy's Wife is some kind of "alternate" title (and in fact, most people who work on the play end up calling it "Pissy's Wife"--a little easier to say) Where I grew up, you would often hear women introduced with phrases such as "And this is Betty, Hank's wife," so my intention was to show how Marg didn't have an identity independent of her husband Pissy. Important, since the play is all about her self-actualizing and becoming a forthright and independent "individual".

The show has about 10 songs. Some of the lyrics were written by me, some by Paul Morgan Donald, the composer, and some by both of us. Paul wrote some absolutely beautiful music for the show, and some of the songs, like Laughing Girl and The Stupid Tree Song, are stunning.

Another point of clarification: Marg is pronounced with a hard "g", not a "j" sound, and her last name is pronounced "SKAA-LOO-BAA". If you have trouble pronouncing "Pissy" you probably shouldn't read beyond the title anyway.

Here's an excerpt from near the beginning of the play:

When I was in Grade Ten, I met my first boyfriend. His name was Pete, but everyone called him Pissy. Pissy Szkaluba. That's where I got my last name from. He was young, he was dumb-looking like me, he was from a God-fearing family, and I figured he might be worth a go. So at one of the school dances in late April, when we're all smoking with lust, I hung around him, begging him to notice me, till we both ended up outside behind the gym. And when Pissy thrust his hand up my blouse with the smell of beer on his hot breath and planted his lips on mine...well I fluttered, and I felt that joy, that ecstasy that's available to anyone no matter how ugly or poor or stupid you are. I released myself to the ecstacy of Pissy Szkaluba and let him have me right then and there.

He was as surprised as I was.

And then later it happened of course. I discovered I was pregnant, but I wasn't worried because I thought that's what should happen. I learned that I ain't supposed to go nowhere or become anything...so...we dropped out of school and got married. Pissy had to, everybody knew. There weren't no trouble there. And we got lots of encouragement from the Pastor Blackshaw at Pissy's church, who wanted to make sure we didn't end up headed to meet Mr. Horns and Flames. We got married in June, when weddings are supposed to be if they're about true love and romance and all that. It was a nice wedding. We had all the wedding things--bridesmaids and groomsmen. As we all marched in and out, I couldn't help but be reminded of the last formal ceremony I was at and that it all made me think of...pallbearers.

I got married. I had kids.

When you find out you're dumb, you kind of lose hope. But then you realize a certain bunch of us have to end up in those lower-down jobs. Pissy got a job at a scrap yard, running the weighing scales and sorting through the junk. Being the sludge at the bottom don't trouble you after a while though, 'cause there's things you can take to, like TV or booze or making kids. Some folks take to God to compensate, hoping for a payout in the afterlife. Pissy, he was God-fearing and everything, but after we got married he went at it even stronger. He was all for Jesus. He had Jesus slogans and Jesus posters up all over the inside of the weigh shack at the scrap yard. He had Jesus T-shirts and Jesus bumper stickers. He tried to get a custom license plate that said, "Yo Jesus."

Somebody already had one.

Inside the house he had the TV going all the time, tuned in to the Christian channel, which was hi-jacked from the American airwaves and beamed out at us from Harry Hillis's Wheat Pool Elevator, courtesy of Pissy's church.

While Pissy had all that Jesus business to keep him company, I had an old A.M. radio on the counter in the kitchen. I had to fight for it with the kids, who wanted to hear the hits that thundered out from the big city station a couple a hundred miles away. But that music had so far to go, it was worn tired by the time it settled in our little radio. When the kids weren't around, I'd listen to the country station, which was local and had a nice strong signal, except the music was interrupted every evening at 7:00 p.m. by "Back to the Bible", also courtesy of Pissy's church. "Back to the Bible", where they'd talk about Good and Evil and Asses and Camels and Desert and things that happened in a tiny patch of the earth ten thousand miles away two thousand years ago.

Just like Star Wars.

Besides Jesus and me, Pissy had one of them big hairless dogs--a male, the kind that looks like their balls have been squeezed out of their assholes like turds that haven't quite let loose. He named him Gabriel. Often times when I'd see Pissy reading his Bible he'd be stroking that hound at the same time, and I got thinkng that bald mutt was worth more to him in the flesh than any sayings of Jesus on a poster.

Or me. After about five years the only real contact I had with Pissy was a poke and a jab on a Saturday night after he came home from beering it with the Pastor Blackshaw and the rest of his holy cohorts.

(Song: Bad Breath and Uncut Toenails)

His eyes are blue like summer water
But he stinks like a carrion wind
Thin brown forearms, the rest white skin
with bad breath and uncut toenails

Reads the Bible like a good man should
Then he wrestles me down to the floor
Pops my buttons and bruises my thighs
With bad breath and uncut toenails

CHORUS
Don't feel too good, Pissy
Don't feel too good
Must be other men in the world,
Don't feel too good, Pissy
Don't feel too good
Must be better things in the Milky Way.

He comes in sweating from his job
Pops a brew and turns on the tube
Moans for his dinner and farts his beer
With bad breath and uncut toenails

Finally the night brings peace inside
I wonder while the old man snores
Is he an accurate specimen?
With bad breath and uncut toenails

I learned a lot of things from Pissy and Pastor Blackshaw, things about my duty as a wife. I won't say that they were great things, but they sure did affect my life, my chunks.

For example, we managed to save up enough cash to pick up four or five acres about ten miles out of town. Now this was not an "acreage". It was a place that suited hogs and cows, not swimming pools, I'll tell you that. One evening we had a car pull in the yard. Now Pissy's dog, Gabriel, the one with the balls, normally he don't mind much when a car pulls in. He pricks up his ears, you know, and he gets up, you know, but he don't make a fuss. He wasn't making a fuss then, either, until Pissy jumped up and started screaming, "Marg! Marg! There's a Hindu in the yard!" at which point Gabriel started snarling and howling like he was rabid like the devil. I says, "What's a Hindu?" and Pissy says,, "Jumpin' Judas, Marg. A Hindu's one of them people that smells like curry and comes here to take all the land and money away from us. Look, Gabriel even knows there's something wrong!" Gabriel did start to get fierce, but he was reacting to Pissy getting all worked up.

I didn't know that though.

So Pissy says, "You better hold Gabe back. We don't know what he might do here, Marg!" and I says, "No! No! Let him get the Hindu! Let him get the Hindu!" and I became more and more frantic until--

(Marg slaps her guitar, hard, to mimic Pissy striking her.)

Pissy brought me back to my senses with a cuff on the jaw and says, "Hold the dog, Marg, just hold the dog. We don't know what the fine is for a dog biting a Hindu unprovoked, so just hold him and if that nigger-skinned-curry-sucker tries anything, then you can let him loose."

So this fellow came to the door. A young man lost in the country. Pissy told him how to get back to the highway while I held back the trembling dog. From then on, Pissy was always raving about the perceptive powers of Gabriel, telling everybody in the church, "Now you can't tell me there isn't something sneaky and conniving about them Hindu heathens if Gabriel could sense it, eh?

This is a true story.