The Plays
Coney Isalnd Avenue [sample]
by Charles L. Mee
Scene 88. The Lottery
[Jean enters,
carrying her cardboard box.
She goes to the card table,
opens her box,
and takes out a handful of cards.]
JEAN
This, basically,
is all you'll need
to build your lottery ticket house.
[laughs]
I mean,
you'll need a lot of them!
But they're not hard to find.
You can build the entire house of discarded tickets.
I myself am building several apartment buildings
arranged around a central courtyard
with a playground in the middle for the children.
What you do is,
I mean I think everyone basically knows how to
build a house of cards?
So you place them like this.
I use a scissors
to cut the little places where you want to
join the two cards together.
And then just a little spot of glue.
Like this.
There you have it.
Two cards joined together,
this is the basic unit.
You take another two cards,
cut the little place,
join them together.
Spot of glue.
And put them with the first two cards
and you have a room.
You can leave an open space between the two units
for two doorways.
Or, of course, you can put them together to make your room
and then you would want to cut out a little door.
One more card for the roof,
and there you have it.
You group some rooms
say five or ten or twenty
depending on how large a building you want to build
and that becomes your ground floor.
And you build up from there.
I've built thirty-four story buildings
with lottery tickets.
As well as
car ports,
river piers
small stand-alone ranch houses,
bigger summer houses with decks and terraces,
swimming pools.
The most amazing thing, obviously,
is that your discarded lottery tickets are all free
and since you are investing your own labor
that's essentially free, too.
So, in this way,
you can always have a place to live
that is beautiful
and even, in fact,
a work of art.
And then, too, of course,
if you incorporate in your work
the occasional lottery ticket that you purchase,
rather than making the whole thing out of discarded tickets,
then you also have a chance at
capital appreciation
just as you do with any other real estate investment.
