No Boundaries University Bookstore

This week, we played No Boundaries by Marc Hobbs in a Boundaries university bookstore in NYC, a store whose corporate owner may be struggling but our crew of workers continue showing up each day. We are the cocky clean-up man Greg, our drama-queen cashier Ginnie, former student and customer service rep Tyler, and aspiring singer and store shelver Zeta. We start waiting to open the store on the morning of New Year’s Day discussing our evenings. Zeta and Ginnie both come sauntering up to the store straight from their revels dressed to the nines, while Tyler and Greg arrive dressed for work and relate their comparativley sedate evenings.

Early in the new year, the store begins selling vaping canisters and supplies leading Ginnie to post to Instagram about our wares, in particular starting memes with catchy phrases below a picture or gif of Tyler looking hapless. One of her posts is picked up by Cardi B, leading us to try enticing her to appear at the store. Zeta hopes to be discovered when the star arrives, but Tyler approaches Greg about whether there might be a secondary exit he can use to escape the crowds. Greg prepares a grease bucket next to an air vent for him and explains how to follow it outside. On the big day, the event is interrupted by the need for the fire department to retrieve Tyler from the building HVAC system.

All the publicity from the Cardi B event and Tyler’s rescue by the FDNY (he appeared in their calendar) leads corporate to change the store’s image to an urban lifestyle brand: No Boundaries. As new lifestyle merchandise moves in, we have to get more creative and begin piling more and more books into the seldom-used children’s section. Tyler is chagrined by all the notoriety brought on by the rescue, especially since corporate used an image of his topless and greased body from that night in all the stores advertising, so he plots with Zeta to convince Ginnie to post more about the singer than the unwilling poster boy. Meanwhile, Zeta and Greg continue to share their friend’s homemade drug, space juice.

Meanwhile, corporate decides to hand control of the store’s cafe over to Taco Bell, thinking it will appeal more to the new clientele. Greg sets up the deep fryers in the children’s section, since they don’t fit anywhere else, but Zeta is incensed, having promised themselves never to come home smelling of oil. Ginnie can hardly contain herself when a customer comes up to the books register to order a dozen chalupas and refuses to recognize the necessity of visiting the cafe, so Tyler has to smooth things over and gets, embarrassingly, recognized again. Zeta and Ginnie are making progress with the new meme content to promote Z’s voice, but worry about the cease & desist they received from Lady Gaga about the unlicensed sale of her eyelashes on eBay. As the year comes to a close, we learn that the university is kicking Boundaries out of the store since it is no longer able to serve student’s textbook needs, so we plan an online protest campaign, including sit-ins and fundraisers to save the store.

In epilogues flashing forward to our futures, we see Greg testifying in a class-action lawsuit against vaping manufacturers, Zeta managing minor YouTube celebrity status, Ginnie going on a virtual apology tour after bringing on the wrath of the internet by posting the wrong meme, and Tyler, nervously clutching his job application, waiting to beg for a job with the new managers of the university bookstore.