Snow Ball Paper - Danny Hoch (Final Edits

[Danny Hoch]
Danny Hoch, an actor, play writer and director, is known for one of his selected works called Jails, Hospitals & Hip Hop, which includes five different monologues of five different characters and scenarios. With his stories, Danny has a unique way of exposing the audience with a revelation. Like most stories, the revelation is figured out in the end when the character announces what he/she had basically learned. What differentiates Danny and his stories from other stories is that his stories keep the viewer engaged on what might happen next. In all five of his monologues, Danny portrays different characters that have the tendency to talk a lot. Whether he talks in a rather slow or fast pace, Danny Hoch wants to make sure that the viewer can feel what he feels when he tells the story of a characters experience. By dragging the viewer to a surreal situation that not many people have experienced draws the audience to learn more about what Danny has to offer about his revelation, allowing people to take a moment and think about what he had acted out.
In one of Danny’s monologues, he acted out a character named Andy who worked in a prison where he explained his issues to his co-worker while working. Andy started the story by talking about his previous job in McDonalds and how there was this one time when he served senior citizens and was impatiently waiting to take their order. He complained how the senior citizens thought of him of some kind of a thief and sarcastically enough, Andy said if he were a thief he would have been on the other side of the counter behind the guy instead. All Andy wanted was to give the senior citizens their order of a cup of coffee and leave him alone. However that was not how the story ended. One of the senior citizens came back and complained about the coffee and how it tasted horrible. Andy, already frustrated, suddenly exploded on the customer telling him to go get some coffee in Starbucks if he does not like the coffee in McDonalds:

“But no, because that's not good enough for them either, cause they got a heart condition or somethin', like I give a fuckin' shit! I got AIDS, you wanna compete with me, you wrinkled fuckin' Sun Maid raisin' motherfuckers? […] [The old man] says, “Oh, you're not treating me like a customer should be treated! What about the rights of the customer? This is America, I'm the customer!” I said, Yeah? Fuck you customer! Fuck-You-Customer! Then he starts complainin' to the manager that I'm a fuckin' asshole. Psst, yeah. For $5.50 an hour I'd rather stay right here in jail, thank you very much.” (Jails, Hospitals & Hip Hop - Danny Hoch).

Andy knew that he was not going to let a little situation about a man and his coffee get to him. He reveals to the viewers that he has his own problems to worry about, like his condition of having AIDS. Andy would have rather worked in the prison, where it is bad enough to be in a place surrounded by prisoners. Unlike prisoners, it is not often to hear a prisoner complaining about a cup of coffee.
Danny Hoch tries to portray the revelation that it is all in a person’s head when he/she thinks something is wrong with him/her; having the need of attention in order to gain comfort. He argues against that ‘need for attention’ because other people have their own problems to think about, which does not give people enough time to think about others when they have problems. Danny, acting as Andy, wanted to show that just because he was in working behind a counter in McDonalds looking like a thief to the senior citizens does not mean that he does not have any problems of his own. His story is distinctive in its own way because Danny Hoch expressed a story about a man named Andy who can careless about an old man’s problem by showing the audience how he defended himself by cursing at the old man—does not happen everyday.
The revelation trope that could be found in Danny’s Monologue is the use of excessive language towards the old man and to the audience. From the tone of his voice, the audience can recognize his anger through what he had previously gone through. One can assume that the whole monologue is full of curse words because he expresses his anger in a way that is familiar to most people who do curse when he/she is mad.
One can agree that Andy’s story has a binary opposition of the essence vs. appearance. Andy’s description of the scene taken place in Mc Donald’s is surely the essence of what he had truly felt, but it was the situation itself that represented the essence vs. appearance. Just by looking at Andy’s appearance, the old man already perceived what kind of man Andy was. He easily assumed that Andy did not have serious problems like the old man had. Though, because of the old man’s assumption, Andy argued against him by using his true essence that he did have problems of his own. The essence is not necessarily the soul itself, but it also is the truth behind the person which makes him/her who they are today.