Madness string 98287

Random mermaid
Keep your aspirations to yourself. Telling anyone in your household or social strata about your plans to get out and do better may be met with bitterness and downright ridicule. People will call you uppity for wanting to go to school or stupid for having a career goal that isn't modest and local and vaguely dead-end. People will tell you that you have no common sense simply because you refuse to see the world in terms of pure survival.
A darkened auditorium with 264 silent people in the seats. on the stage, me, sitting on a stool, lit by a spotlight, the only light in the theatre. I hold up a photo of my cat, ten people applaud, two or three hold up photocopies of the same photo, the rest do nothing, watching, waiting.