hiester.com

NOTE: Toll Brothers is the sponsor of the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday radio broadcasts. Thus, a Toll Brothers opera.

Act I

Fred, an assistant manager at a suburban big-box electronics super-store, has just received a foreclosure notice on the $800,000 Toll Brothers house he owns in the new Disappearing Farms ^* development. He asks, “how could this happen to me? Three months ago my payment was $359, and now it’s $5400?” As he sits sobbing on the floor of his great room under a 20-foot high cathedral ceiling, he implores the gods to explain negative amortization recasting to him.

Meanwhile, Fred’s neighbor Subprimos, manager of a hedge fund, pleads with his wife Trophelia to wait another year before installing an in-ground swimming pool behind their 12-bedroom Toll Brothers Lexington home with Palm Beach sunroom and Palladian Kitchen. Darkness envelops the couple as he explains how his bad bets on natural gas and derivatives on collateralized debt obligations in mortgages have sucked $4 billion out of his fund. Trophelia counters that five other homes in the development have in-ground swimming pools and she cannot withstand the shame of being without a pool any longer. She storms off to the five-car garage and races away in her Range Rover to meet her college-aged lover, Milfman, at Starbucks.

To be continued…

^* Special Thanks to my brother Mark Hiester for the subdivision name. Disappearing Farms was one of the hundreds on a brilliant list of satirical development names he wrote a few years ago. My second favorite was Kangaroo Court.