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HOST: Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a really, really wonderful group of bachelors here for you tonight—a really exceptional group. Gentlemen, would you like to introduce yourselves? . . . No? I guess I will, then.

Bachelor Number One comes to us from Denmark. His royal blood has been angried by an adolescence of sleepless nights and suicide attempts. Ladies, this man has got the three Rs on his mind: reading, writing, and retaliatory regicide. Let’s say hello to . . . Hamlet, Prince of Danes!

HAMLET: O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

HOST: Thank you. Bachelor Number Two is a pale young man with a hatred of sunlight and love of the bottle. He spends his time riding reindeers, feeling up trolls, and bearing the sins of his father. Let’s say hello to . . . Peer Gynt, son of Jon Gynt!

PEER GYNT: See here now—I’m fleeing from trouble. I thought at least here I’d be free!

HOST: Right, son, nothing freer than network television! And finally, Bachelor Number Three is basically blind, old for his looks, and young for his age—this bachelor’s heresy drove his mother to an early deathbed while he played Cronus to his father’s Uranus. Please say hello to the Dublin-born lecher . . . Stephen Dedalus!

STEPHEN DEDALUS: On and on and on, ho! I can see my future unfolding magnificently before me!

HOST: Yes, you can! Especially if you use Brill-O shaving cream: the only cream that’s worth a close shave and our official sponsor of the night. Now let’s meet our lovely bachelorette. I’d like to reassure the network audience that she has been kept in a sound-proof booth this entire time, so she knows neither the names nor the biographies of our thrilling young bachelors. Come on downstage, sweetie. What’s your name?

DOLORES: It’s Dolores.

HOST: Wonderful! And tell us a little bit about yourself.

DOLORES: I’m a systems analyst from Denver, Colorado. I enjoy ice cream and am a licensed scuba diver.

HOST: Ice cream? Well, that’s just swell! Now Dolores, we’ve got some very special bachelors here for you tonight. If you don’t mind, we’ll just have you sit in that chair and start asking the gentlemen on the other side of the wall a few questions.

DOLORES: Bachelor Number One, do you think you have been treated well by the women in your life?

HAMLET: Let me not think on’t—Frailty, thy name is woman!— A little month, or ere those shoes were old With which she follow’d my poor father's body, Like Niobe, all tears: —why she, even she— O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason, Would have mourn’d longer—married with my uncle, My father’s brother, but no more like my father Than I to Hercules: within a month: Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, She married. O, most wicked speed, to post With such dexterity to incestuous sheets! It is not nor it cannot come to good: But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.

DOLORES: Ha-ha! You’re funny! Bachelor Number Two, same question. PEER GYNT: Tell me, does the woman wear her little apron on her shirt front and carry with marked innocence her book of verses? Does she do a waltz around you in the snow and beckon you by the bye with the gleam in her eyes? DOLORES: Umm . . . can—

PEER GYNT: Hush now! There’s time enough for that yet. Have you been to the mountains of Geldin? There is a princess who lives there, magnificent astride the wild horse of King Bjaärturk, and she rides gracefully across the white cliffs, appearing only to those suitors who’ve drunk the sacred mead of the evil troll Gleskïnglaäk . . .

DOLORES: OK . . . Well, I’m certainly not going horseback riding with you! Bachelor Number Three, can you tell me where you’re most ticklish?

STEPHEN DEDALUS: Restate the inquest.

DOLORES: The, um, place . . .

STEPHEN DEDALUS: I find every particle of this insensate body’s composition is woefully dead to the touch—a woman’s or a mother’s—until I can claw my way out of Satan’s unheavenly maw. To be good is to die; only in death, perhaps, will I find pleasure.

DOLORES: Umm . . . Bachelor Number One, what do you like better, sunrises or sunsets?

HAMLET: Ha-ha! Are you honest?

DOLORES: What do you mean?

HAMLET: Are you fair?

DOLORES: I’m afraid I don’t understand . . .

HAMLET: That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.