I, Claudia, Claudia

I, CLAUDIA by Kristen Thomson FEMALE – COMEDY

CLAUDIA (Finding refuge in the basement of her school)

Some kids are mad when they’re teenagers, right? Like in movies and at school lots of kids hate their dads. For different reasons at different times. Some kids hate their dads ‘cause they want to shoot speed into their arms! Dads don’t let them. Dads try to stop them. They say “I’m shooting speed into my arm and you can’t stop me!” And that’s ‘cause they’re into speed.

But I would never do that ‘cause I don’t hate my dad. My dad is my best friend and I get to see him every week! It starts Monday after school at 3:45. I wait for him in the park across the street from school and he is never late like other kids’ parents and we do something totally bohemian together like go bowling or for pizza. And I have to say, it is the best moment of my entire life because there’s so much to talk about and we’re both hi-larious. Like every time I say, “I’m thirsty,” he says, “I’m Friday,” which is just something between us, like father-daughter. And then we go down to his apartment which is a downtown condo where I have my own room with a name plate on the door that says “Albert” for a joke and so I say to him, I say, “al- BERT”—and I have lots of posters, no pets, and I do homework and we just hang out and then I go to sleep. And when I wake up on Tuesday morning it is the worst day of my entire life because it’s the beginning of the whole next week of not seeing him. So I come down here on Tuesday morning before class to get control of myself.

But Tuesday is also sophisticated because my Dad leaves for work before me so I get about twenty minutes in the apartment all by myself, which is very special time for me which I think of as my teen time. Like, I drink juice but I drink it out of a coffee mug. I look out over the vast cityscape and listen to the top music of my time…