Ladies and gentlemen, tonight I have the honor of performing the annual orphan monologue for this year&rsquo;s fundraising gala. May it move you to tears and to open your checkbooks.&nbsp;
Ahem. Pennies, oh how I lust for yummy pennies. Each bite shatters the pernicious veil of pauperism as well as my malnourished teeth. The crude, metallic texture blesses my poor, mangled hands, and its nutrients sustain me.&nbsp;
I envy the parent-having boys, who shower me with leftover hors d'oeuvres when I do tricks. But alas, I&rsquo;m forced to spend my days asking &ldquo;please sir, may I have some more,&rdquo; to which the public groundskeeper always replies, &ldquo;the water in the lake is free, but unsafe to drink.&rdquo;&nbsp;
The groundskeeper is somewhat of an alive father figure to me. Because of him, I bathe luxuriously in the swamp from which I drink. He even allows me to sleep in the garden if I scare away all the other vagrants. When I&rsquo;m triumphant, I relish in the spoils of their rubbish.&nbsp;
Life is pain, and when the groundskeeper forces me to play hide-and-go-kill with the raccoons, it remains pain. But as he always implies through the tasks he gives me, anything is better than loneliness.&nbsp;
At the end of the day, I lack parents. Nevertheless, due to the endless generosity of this foundation&rsquo;s scholarships, I live with the hope that one day I will drain this fine nation&rsquo;s welfare system.

Ladies and gentlemen, tonight I have the honor of performing the annual orphan monologue for this ye...

Oliver Twist

Dear Ethan,
I am your great-great-great-great-grandson, and I sent this message from the future to warn you. Something very bad is about to happen to you and all your future descendants, and you must act swiftly to save us.&nbsp;
You see Ethan, around two months from now, the Reckoning will occur. Aliens will come from the sky and claim Earth as their colony. They will swiftly crush any resistance, and organize the population by attractiveness. The hottest will thrive in utopia, and the homely will wallow in poverty.&nbsp;
Unfortunately, history tells us that you were relegated to the lowest of thousands of tiers, doomed to suffer in a life of destitution in a desolate slum. You will be the last Huberton to know the simple joys of console gaming and running water, and every single one of your descendants will toil in factories, assembling luxury handbags until they die. I am writing this message during our 5-minute lunch break, in which we must prepare our master&rsquo;s mid-day feast.&nbsp;
I accessed images taken from the day of the Reckoning and I implore you Ethan, do something about your appearance while you still can. Buy tighter jeans, shoes with laces, and for the love of god trim your back hair. No boy should have longer back hair than head hair. Try physical therapy for your hunchback, shoe inserts for your height, and balaclavas for the face. Oh, and those cargo shorts you wore every day last summer? Keep those around. The aliens love cargo shorts.&nbsp;
While it is of existential importance that you do everything within your powers to improve your physical appearance, it is also important to have fun while doing so. So pawn the family heirloom and hire a clown. This will likely be the last time you see a clown, so savor it.

Dear Ethan,
I am your great-great-great-great-grandson, and I sent this message from the future to ...

Warning from the Future

The national draft is underway, and as an amputee I&rsquo;m terrified of active combat. Thankfully, I&rsquo;m in the final stages of a foolproof plan to exempt myself from military service.&nbsp;
Step one, join Congress. Check. Step two, work my way through the ranks and become President of the United States. Check minus, I won on an electoral college technicality. Step three, sign an executive order exempting amputees from the draft. Check plus, my ratings went through the roof. Step four, make an appearance on late night television and publicly admit that I have a prosthetic leg, thereby excusing me from mandatory military service.
Step four is proving more difficult than I expected. When I devised this plan, I thought that becoming President would be the hardest part. But after nearly two terms in the Oval Office, I just can&rsquo;t bring myself to disappoint a country which has come to expect professionally-edited clips of me dunking a basketball almost as much as my landmark prison-preschool consolidation reforms.&nbsp;
If I come clean, the people are going to have questions. The Presidential waltz, the Cabinet vs. aides kickball game, the Presidential worm. Was any of it real? they will ask. Only the Presidential worm, I&rsquo;ll have to tell them.
Every night I have a recurring dream, where Jimmy Fallon tosses my prosthetic leg around a live studio audience as they howl with laughter. Production assistants keep the floor under me slick with peanut oil to maximize the laugh factor, and I&rsquo;m slipping and sliding across the stage as the band plays the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme song to roaring applause. I watch helplessly from my peanut oil patch as my Veep is declared President, crowned in a ceremony where dozens of heads of state pledge their loyalty and offer extravagant gifts like elephants and valuable real estate in emerging markets.&nbsp;
Honestly, I don&rsquo;t mind that dream. I kind of like the smell of the peanut oil, and it&rsquo;s nice to feel like I&rsquo;m taking a break from being President every night when I go to sleep. It&rsquo;s a stressful job, with lots of responsibilities such as the growing guilt of lying to the American people about having two legs and hiding all the UFOs.&nbsp;
As Commander-in-Chief, I&rsquo;m pretty involved in this war already. I spend most of my days locked in meetings with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when I&rsquo;m not worrying about getting drafted. Perhaps I should just end it all. But it feels like taking the easy way out. Strictly speaking, we don&rsquo;t have to be at war with Canada, but ending it now just feels cowardly.

The national draft is underway, and as an amputee I’m terrified of active combat. Thankfully, I’m in...

Draft Dodging

<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Hey. (gurgles) You think this is allowed? (spits)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It&rsquo;s not even really drinking, man!&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Cool. How about this? (beatboxes) Or is it too percussive?</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It&rsquo;s freaking awesome, they&rsquo;re gonna love it.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Heeeeyah! (smashes three thin planks of balsa wood) Sensei says self-defense is holy.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Wooooo! Go David! You&rsquo;re gonna be the life of the party. Let&rsquo;s head out.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Wait. I need to find my yo-yo first.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Dude, no. You can&rsquo;t bring the yo-yos.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Is it against the Bible?&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">No, Father Gordon got all tangled up in one and it tore his manhood off.</li>
</ul>


Hey. (gurgles) You think this is allowed? (spits)
It’s not even really drinking, man! 
Cool. How...

Puritan Party

My first company-wide meeting as chairman started smoothly, but when I announced my plan to ban unionization at the company, the strangest thing happened. My employees started to band together against me, and I felt a foreign force take control of my body. The indignant voices of my colleagues faded and I heard a strange but familiar voice in my head. It&rsquo;s time, son.
Show &lsquo;em what you got. The muscles in my body, moving to the beat of a better man&rsquo;s drum, worked in deft coordination and I found myself standing confidently on the middle of the table. Now pee. Helpless, I felt my leg become damp, and a shocked silence swept the room. For the company.
Everyone&rsquo;s attention was focused on me and my now fully soaked suit, and the union shills began to falter. You&rsquo;re a star. Now piss like one, I heard as more liquid than I had ever consumed gushed from my masculine birthright. Embarrassed and lightheaded, I tried desperately to regain control.
Stop fighting. Let go, the voice urged, and I felt myself surrender to the stream. Wave after wave of catharsis rocked my body as I embraced my purpose.
In mere moments, the room was flooded. Panicked, pleading voices were drowned out by my urine. Fully submerged, I saw my dad on the other side of the room, beckoning to me.
The job is done. Control rushed back to my body and I swam towards him, only to be disappointed. No one was there besides the flailing bodies of the employees who could not swim.
As if on cue, the voice returned one final time. I&rsquo;m proud of you.

My first company-wide meeting as chairman started smoothly, but when I announced my plan to ban unio...

Sleeper Agent

Dear Suburbs,
You are my roots; I owe you everything.
You molded me into the man that the city took and molded into an even better man. Without you, I would never have learned how to drive. Now I can empathize with the people whose job it is to drive everyone else. They&rsquo;re like designated drivers, but you pay them and most of the time you&rsquo;re not even drunk. Do I ever wish you had taught me more about public transport? Never. You taught me all that I need to know about public transport, and I have faithfully avoided it since.
Two weeks ago, when I first left the comfort of your stiflingly homogenous arms, I was terrified. Armed with your many cautionary tales, I braced myself for the violence, dumpster fires, and caf&eacute; culture. For a while, I was so scared of getting mugged that I always left my wallet at home when leaving the apartment. But on the first day I left the house with my wallet, I was mugged by a man in an Elmo costume. He made me take a picture with him and then took everything. Instead of feeling depressed, I was relieved. Getting mugged was significantly less violent and touchy than you made it seem in your stories. Thank you for setting my expectations so low.
One thing I wish you&rsquo;d warned me more about is the people. Boy, has it been an adjustment. Almost none of the women here are mothers, and some of the mothers aren&rsquo;t women. There&rsquo;s a lot of other stuff that I won&rsquo;t mention because it would upset you too much, but I will say that my doorman is an Irish, but everyone treats him like one of us.
Despite the unparalleled access to any goods and services that I could ever want or need, the city means nothing to me. It&rsquo;s simply a way to make a name for myself, meet my soulmate, and expand my mind. I haven&rsquo;t had even a single casserole or 10pm bedtime since the day I arrived in this godforsaken locus of art and finance and culture. The point is, I miss you. And I truly hope that someday, no earlier than twenty years from now, I can return to you as your prodigal son and raise a family of my own.
Love,
Ben (I stopped going by Benjamin, for now)

Dear Suburbs,
You are my roots; I owe you everything.
You molded me into the man that the city too...

Reddy Lee.css-1xlpnei{margin:0px -15px 0px 6px;width:11px;vertical-align:-14px;}

Reddy Lee