Page 33 - Big Idea

The Big Idea – Act 2

WOMAN 3: But mud isn’t worth anything. Anybody can go and
scoop it out of the ground. Meat is difficult to hunt and tricky to dry
properly. We’ll go get our own mud!

ENTREPRENEUR: All right, if that’s how you feel about it. But I
am the only one who knows where it is.

WOMAN 2: Tell us where!

ENTREPRENEUR: Ladies, you must try to understand the
principles of trade and enterprise. I make my living by traveling
about, finding items that are plentiful in one place and bringing them
to another where they are scarce. You cannot expect me to give away
either my merchandise or my sources. Now, my final offer to you,
today, because this meeting is a special occasion, is fifteen strips of
meat for a week’s supply of my wonderful, rejuvenating, purifying,
pore-toning, tissue-nourishing, wrinkle-reducing, all-natural, fresh-
from-the-river mud.

WOMAN 2: Not a chance!

WOMAN 3: I’d like some, but I can’t spare the meat.

WOMAN 2: Come on, we’re wasting our time on this mud-man.
(WOMEN 2 and 3 return to back of cave)

ENTREPRENEUR: (glumly)
What profit has a man if he gains in the world!
But losing his whole stock in trade is to be hurled
From the heights of delight to the depths of despair—
But it isn’t the first time that I’ve wound up there.

Like those peaks and valleys of commercial success,
The landscape itself demonstrates a great excess
And deficiency in distributing those things
Its inhabitants insist that the merchant brings.

A shortage here, a surplus there—all must I track:
Then bargain for hours before I can fill my pack
With items I hope will not turn out redundant
In a market where I’d thought them not abundant.

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