Ebenezer Scrooge is an old-school London businessman with a decidedly no-nonsense attitude toward work, life and death. This tight-fisted hand at the grindstone spoke to NAKED STAGES prior to his December 18-21 appearance at Belmont University’s Black Box Theatre:

1. What is your opinion of your late partner Jacob Marley?

We were partners for I don’t know how many years. I was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner. His death seven years ago was a sad event, but I remained a man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnized it with an undoubted bargain. I never painted out Old Marley’s name. It’s still there, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business call me Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but I answer to both names. It’s all the same to me.

2. How about your clerk Bob Cratchit?

My clerk, with fifteen shillings a week, and a wife and family, talks about a Merry Christmas. I’ll retire to Bedlam. He thinks it’s convenient for me to give him the whole day off just because it’s once a year. It’s not convenient, and I think I’m ill-used to a pay a day’s wages for no work. A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!

3. It sounds like you’ve got a real problem with Christmas. Why are you so cross about it?

What else can I be when I live in such a world of fools? Merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in them through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.

4. Money seems to be what you’re interested in no matter what the season. You came from humble origins yet you’re no quite wealthy. Why do you seem so unhappy?

Bah! Humbug! This is the even-handed dealing of the world. There is nothing on which it is as hard as poverty, and yet there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth! 

5. One last question. Do you believe in spirits?

I don’t. Even if my senses were to tell me they existed I know that a slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. They may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about them, whatever they are!