Chapters (10)
| JOAN | I still can’t believe it. | |
| TODD | No one’s ever won in their first week before. | |
| JOAN | It’s all going to be downhill from now on. | |
| TODD | You can’t win every week. | |
| JOAN | That’s what I mean. | |
| TODD | No but you’ll do a fantastic body of work while you’re here. | |
| JOAN | Sometimes I think it’s a pity that more aren’t kept. | |
| TODD | There’d be too many, what would they do with them? | |
| JOAN | They could reuse them. | |
| TODD | Exactly and then we’d be out of work. | |
| JOAN | It seems so sad to burn them with the bodies. | |
| TODD | No I think that’s the joy of it. The hats are ephemeral. It’s like a metaphor for something or other. | |
| JOAN | Well, life. | |
| TODD | Well, life, there you are. Out of nearly three hundred hats I’ve made here I’ve only had three win and go in the museum. But that’s never bothered me. You make beauty and it disappears, I love that. | |
| JOAN | You’re so . . . | |
| TODD | What? | |
| JOAN | You make me think in different ways. Like I’d never have thought about how this place is run and now I see how important it is. | |
| TODD | I think it did impress a certain person that I was speaking from the high moral ground. | |
| JOAN | So tell me again exactly what he said at the end. | |
| TODD | ‘These things must be thought about.’ | |
| JOAN | I think that’s encouraging. | |
| TODD | It could mean he’ll think how to get rid of me. | |
| JOAN | That’s a fantastic shape to start from. | |
| TODD | It’s a new one for me. I’m getting inspired by you. | |
| JOAN | There’s still the journalist. If he looks into it a bit more we could expose the corrupt financial basis of how the whole hat industry is run, not just this place, I bet the whole industry is dodgy. | |
| TODD | Do you think so? | |
| JOAN | I think we should find out. | |
| TODD | You’ve changed my life, do you know that? | |
| JOAN | If you lose your job I’ll resign. | |
| TODD | We might not get jobs in hats again. | |
| JOAN | There’s other parades. | |
| TODD | But I think you’re a hat genius. | |
| JOAN | Unless all the parades are corrupt. | |
| TODD | I love these beads. Use these beads. | |
| JOAN | No, you have them. | |
| TODD | No, you. |
3
3.
Several years later.
HARPER’s house, daytime.