UNMADE BEDS

Created over a seven-month period from July 1996 through January 1997, UNMADE BEDS documents the loneliness, frustration, sadness, regret, and trials of four single New Yorkers who play the dating game and lose. Potentially frightening to those who are in the same boat, it serves as a warning sign to the folly of obsession, mistreatment, objectification, and thoughtlessness of mankind toward those of the opposite sex. Each person gives tell-tale words of their bone-headed choices.

Michael De Stafano is 40 years old, five foot four, graying, very intense, and fed up. He recognizes his negative attitude, but can’t shake it. He has been hurt too long, and he is unable to forgive. He eventually visits a dating counselor for help, but remains embittered.

Aimee Copp is a 28-year-old, overweight, emotionally fragile, friendly, but desperate woman. She cries over bad dates and bothers her ex-boyfriend with spiteful phone calls. Although she is able to confide in her best friend, she places unrealistic ultimatums on herself such as, “I will be married in a year.” At one point, she even contemplates suicide.

Mike Russo is in his late 40s, but looks older. He’s crass, a little obscene, clips his nose and ear hairs, won’t go out with “mutts”, or ugly women, and uses a beeper if a date is bad. He regrets even today of not being able to stick with one of three women he dated in 1974. His old-fashioned, hardboiled speech pattern amuses his dates and the audience, but comes across as an artificial mask. He remarks falsely, “Any man who tells you he hasn’t been with a hooker is a liar.”

Finally, Brenda Monte, 40-ish, ultimately decides to marry a man who offers her $10,000. A kleptomaniac, she also has no problems showing off her somewhat saggy naked body to the audience. Joking about how all her recent dates have wanted to show her their private parts, she lives in a small apartment with her daughter and her poodle. Her bone-head sentence is, “I like to wear kinky dresses even though it attracts bad men.”

UNMADE BEDS is a classic study in co-dependency, looking for completion in others and blaming everyone but yourself for your troubles. All of these people display regret. All are sad. All are lonely. All need intimacy, and all seek it from fellow men. Men will fail us, but the love of Christ endures forever. Not surprisingly, therefore, the audience never discovers if these people are plugged into a wider social network. Though some try nightclubs and some have friends, all are in great need of the healing power of Christ to forgive past sins, offer hope and offer love.

The big city, any big city, can be the loneliest of places. All sensory stimulation offers are freely given, but true love, true intimacy and true relationship are often outside the reach of those who seek it from their flawed fellow men. These people are not hopeless and are not without opportunity to find living waters that never dry up, but unless they go to the well that quenches all thirsts, their future may be as dry as their fears anticipate. God wants to bless them, and all of us, with lasting relationships, but he desires more for them and us to appropriate the cleansing, healing, liberating, joy-giving power of His shed blood. They have knowingly or unknowing unmade their beds and are now lying in them.