The Hendersons' Holiday

A sidewalk.

JOYCE enters and crosses partway, then stops and calls back—

JOYCE For goodness sake, Earl, pick up your feet.

EARL enters.

EARL I don’t see why I can't sleep through the Prescott's vacation photos at home.

JOYCE Because come this fall you'll want to show your photos of our Columbian cruise, and you'll want Duke to come over to take his nap.

EARL They do this every year. They always have to best us—have to take a better vacation, go somewhere more expensive. One of these days we're going to take the ultimate vacation, see how they top that.

JOYCE The cruise, dear, that's our ultimate vacation. You have it all worked out. But do remember it's not a competition.

EARL No? Then what's this reconnaissance mission we're on?

JOYCE Hush.

They arrive at a house's door. JOYCE knocks. HONEY opens the door.

HONEY Joyce! Earl! Come in! So glad you could make it. Can I get you something to drink? Tea, perhaps? Duke has a wonderful vintage he saved from Boston harbor.

EARL Here we go.

JOYCE (jabs Earl) We'd love tea.

HONEY (calling off stage) Duke, the Hendersons are here! (to the Hendersons as she pulls back chairs from a table and indicates for them to sit) They call it a revolutionary war, but I think the real revolution was the invention of soap.

HONEY exits. JOYCE and EARL sit.

JOYCE (calling after her) Indeed. Why, I said almost the exact same thing to Earl when we went west with Lewis—

HONEY (reappears with teacups) Here's your tea. Put plenty of sugar in that. It's bitter but it's genuine!

EARL (raises the teacup in toast) As is the hostess.

JOYCE kicks EARL under the table.

HONEY Let me see what's keeping Duke.

HONEY exits.

JOYCE (hushed, to Earl) Why didn't you say something?

EARL You kicked me because I said something.

JOYCE I kicked you for being rude. I mean why didn't you say something when she interrupted my story about the soap?

EARL You have a story about soap?

JOYCE You remember—

HONEY enters and sits at the table.

HONEY Duke's on his way.

JOYCE So, Honey, how did you like the colonies? Did you stop at that postcard shop I read about, the one where you can take a selfie as Paul Revere rides by out the window?

HONEY Oh, well...

DUKE enters.

DUKE Earl! Joyce! So glad you've come. How's the tea? Did Honey break the bad news?

JOYCE (hopeful) Bad news? (peers worriedly into her teacup)

HONEY He's exaggerating.

DUKE (sits) You were pretty exaggerated when I told you the travel agency's rules. (to the Hendersons) No technology newer than 1800.

EARL So no pictures?

JOYCE Oh, Honey! How distressing! And we were so looking forward.

HONEY Don't worry, don't worry. I found a loophole.

DUKE She hired somebody. I had to pay his way so he could document our every move.

HONEY He took nearly a quarter of a million pictures!

EARL swoons. JOYCE steadies him.

JOYCE How perfectly marvelous! Where do you keep them all?

HONEY Well, that’s the bad news. In my haste, I hired one of those those early twentieth-century photographers who uses film. Said it's going to take a whole year to develop everything.

EARL He took two hundred thousand pictures on film?

JOYCE Honey, I completely understand. We made the same mistake when we were young and foolish, when we went back to the Roaring Twenties. But the fellow we hired was absolutely genius. He returned to his lab, spent a year developing the film, then put the pictures in a safe deposit box in our name—

HONEY I suggested something like that, but apparently not even time travel can hurry Ansel Adams.

JOYCE sputters.

EARL The landscape photographer?

HONEY Boston is beautiful in ‘76.

DUKE Especially with us in the foreground.

JOYCE stands and casually inspects the room.

JOYCE So how was the revolution, dear? Everything they say? All massacres and combing out lice?

JOYCE peeks in HONEY’s hair.

HONEY The revolution was incredible. We actually got to watch Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence. Such an inspiration.

DUKE You don't see men like him anymore.

EARL Only natural.

JOYCE Earl, don't.

HONEY Meeting Thomas Jefferson—I came home changed.

DUKE She came home and changed the drapes.

EARL Colonial lace?

JOYCE inspects the drapes.

DUKE Mm-hmm.

JOYCE Now, Earl, don't be like that. We should change the drapes.

EARL What's wrong with Dolly Madison's drapes?

DUKE Say, Earl, what did you mean about there being no men like Tom Jefferson anymore?

JOYCE Earl...

EARL There's no men like Thomas Jefferson anymore because there's nothing special about the present—no great wars or political crises or scientific discoveries to be made. Hard to be an outstanding general without a war. Hard to be a statesmen without a crisis. Hard to make scientific discoveries when everything's been discovered. The present is boring. Anyone longing for greatness has bugged out, gone one-way back to more exciting times.

JOYCE Earl, that's insulting. You'll have to forgive—

DUKE Earl, that's genius. How'd you come up with it?

EARL Schoolmate of mine. Ugly kid, poor too. Did all his Euclid on the backs of envelopes. Talked all about propositions and self-evident truths. Then one day he vanished. Figured he’d moved. A month later a girl found his picture in a history book. Daguerrotype, dated 1846, captioned "The earliest known photograph of Abraham Lincoln."

HONEY No...

DUKE That's excellent! I'm going to steal that. Say, that explains something to me.

EARL What's that?

Behind the Prescotts JOYCE picks up a picture frame. As the conversation continues, she tries to get EARL to see it, mouthing and gesturing, but EARL has no idea what she's trying to communicate.

DUKE Ever wonder why we don't see anyone from the future taking vacations in our time?

HONEY Oh, Duke, don't get into your end-of-the-world nonsense again. He thinks something awful happens, a nuclear war or an epidemic or the Earth is invaded by aliens.

EARL I always assumed time travel gets banned by the government.

DUKE No, no, no. As someone who went to school with Abraham Lincoln you must have realized it.

EARL Realized what?

DUKE We're too boring!

HONEY Oh, Duke, don't be cynical.

DUKE We live in fly-over country, Honey. Nothing happens here. All the Abraham Lincolns and Tom Jeffersons have gone to more exciting times. Everything worth visiting has already happened. We live after the end of history.

JOYCE (sits) Now, Honey, photos or no, we came to hear about Boston.

HONEY Oh, well, there's not much to say...

DUKE We got scooped.

HONEY Duke, don't call it that. He's teasing.

EARL Scooped?

DUKE We'd been in Boston two days when we ran into the Bodwells.

JOYCE The Bodwells? I didn't think they could afford Boston in '76.

HONEY Our Bodwells can't, but these weren't our Bodwells. The girls were all grown. They must have been, oh, ten years older than our Bodwells.

DUKE Seems they get a windfall in a few years—an inheritance or a lottery—and they splurge it on a grand history tour.

EARL They told me they were saving up for it. Scrimping.

HONEY All I know is, at this very moment, in that shabby little house down the street, they are compiling a list of all the best times to visit anywhere in the world.

JOYCE In the world?

HONEY I'm sure they meant on the east coast.

JOYCE In their time do they ever visit the old neighborhood? It hasn't all gone to shambles by then, has it?

DUKE Are you kidding? Honey wouldn't say word one about when we left, not the way they kept complimenting her on how well she was holding her looks.

JOYCE (stands) Well, Honey, thank you so much for the invitation, and thank you, Duke, for the tea.

HONEY You're not going?

JOYCE I'm afraid we must. If Earl doesn't get his nap...

DUKE Earl-y to bed, Earl-y to rise, as our friend Benny would say.

EARL Wasn't Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in '76?

JOYCE Yes, with Thomas Jefferson. Now come on, dear.

HONEY But, Joyce, you didn't have a chance to tell me about that Columbian cruise you're planning for next fall. Are you learning Spanish?

JOYCE This fall, dear, and Columbus was Italian, but— (she squints at Earl, then—) But we really must be going. Earl. Do invite us back if your Boston Polaroids come in.

HONEY shows JOYCE and EARL to the door.

HONEY Of course, of course. I'm so glad you enjoyed the tea. If you want more, just ask. Duke squeezed more out of that awful harbor water than I can drink in a year.

JOYCE Oh I doubt that. Bye now!

HONEY shuts the door behind them and HONEY and DUKE exit. JOYCE and EARL return across the stage.

JOYCE Did you tell them about our cruise?

EARL Of course not. After all that time I spent calling travel agencies to make sure they hadn't booked something earlier?

JOYCE Well, they did book something earlier than they said. They only skimmed through Boston on their way back to the 1600s. That photo was of them giving a cigarette to John Smith in his canoe.

EARL They went to Jamestown? I knew they didn't meet Thomas Jefferson. They hardly sounded all liberty, equality, and fraternity to me.

JOYCE They figured if we saw off Lewis and Clark last fall we would expect them to visit the Revolution, but rather than let us follow that with an easy French and Indian War, they skipped over pre-Revolutionary America entirely. They had to up the budget.

EARL Isn't that why you wanted a Columbian cruise?

JOYCE Hush. I still think you let something slip.

EARL I'm sure the Bodwells mentioned it.

JOYCE The Bodwells—them and their world history tour. It's not fair. A Colombian cruise just doesn't cut it anymore. Is it too late to change our plans? You know, Columbus wasn't the first to discover America. We can take a Viking cruise!

EARL Ugh. You hate the cold.

JOYCE Don't be absurd, dear. Our vacation's not about me.

EARL Right.

They exit.