Good evening.

Tonight's entertainment is for mature audiences only.

What follows is an audio play conceived of in a drunken fever dream of Russian literature and social media posts,

it is a tale of sorrow told by an idiot.

Recorded on a roadcaster pro,

if you're one of our younger listeners or you're more squeamish or you're feeling ill

this evening or faint of heart, you should turn this off and listen to an episode of, I don't know,

balling out super or the antifada, or, or, or something boring and repetitive

that will put you to sleep like a, like the Legion of Skanks podcast or something.

You can lull yourself to sleep by counting the repeated joke premises like so many sheep or something

like that or maybe just enjoy a nice evening offline the scariest thought of all.

But if you must proceed,

I will give you one last warning,

which is a spoiler warning.

The following audio play is based loosely on the Russian novel,

The Master in Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

It's a really good novel, and if you are extremely pure of mind, you may want to shut this off and read an entire

300-page novel before listening to a story extremely loosely based on it. That would be a bit excessive, though.

I think our story doesn't really spoil anything.

Or I guess I also don't think that the story of the Master and Margarita is particularly spoilable.

It's not a mystery.

It's a novel with themes and metaphors and things like that,

...