Happy New Year 2013.
Yesterday, I spent part of the afternoon laughing my head off watching Bill Murray in the movie "Lost in Translation". He is so hilarious and deadpan, watching him I can't help myself. He's in Japan. There's the scene where he's standing in the middle of an elevator, surrounded by the local businessmen. He towers over all of them by at least a foot and can look down on the tops of their heads. Nobody speaks and the businessmen are majorly bespectacled with their over-sized black-rimmed glasses. All eyes are riveted on the numbers above the door opening. You can see the businessmen actors trying hard not to laugh, but Bill remains straight-faced as ever, except for those dancing, twinkling eyes of his. You know he's getting a real kick out of the moment.
Then there's one of the scenes where he's the actor in a TV commercial. He's raising his glass in a toast, inviting the audience to try some special brand of alcohol. All of a sudden, the director stops everything and starts ranting and raving. You can guess something went wrong with Bill's delivery, yet you don't know for sure what. The director's face has turned beet red, he's raised his voice and is spitting a little more with each word. Bill obviously wonders what he did wrong and looks to the interpreter for explanation. She doesn't move or offer a hint, but sits quietly, stone-faced, until the director's tirade is over.
When the director is finally finished, he turns on his heel and stalks off, apparently fuming. Bill braces for the interpretation and can't believe when she dwindles it down to about a three word explanation. Surprized, he asks, "are you sure that's all he said?" She turns away. The power of the interpreter...she is arrogant like a cat, and doesn't stoop to answer. The first time this happens, it confirms our suspicions about interpetors. You know darn well they aren't telling you word for word what the person said. I think whole wars may be started because of them. At the very least, they can and do gloss messages over. The irony is where the power lies. He is supposed to be the "star", yet she has got him by the short hairs.
The second and third times you experience this communication glitch, it just gets funnier and funnier. The reality is, he's trapped in a situation of politics, politeness, and saving face. There's not a single thing he can do about it, but go with the flow. Since the director is having a total melt-down and Bill can't figure out what to do with his acting he starts ad libbing, the way only Bill Murray can. This initial frustration and eventual abandoning of all convention is the same theme he works through time and again throughout the movie. Even though trapped in some kind of hell at both this job and in his marriage, he learns to enjoy himself. One piece of evidence is in his zest for karaoke singing and even though his voice is a little off-key, he sings his heart out with increasingly difficult songs. All his new friends applaud his efforts.
Later I watched a few comedians do their bit on video clips from the internet. I happened in half way through the clip of a man who was raised as the only boy in a family of girls. He said when he had to fight guys while growing up they learned to stay away. Why? Because they knew he would try to tickle them to death.
Joe Braza said that after seven years with his wife, they parted ways because he had started to sound like her, but worse, she had started to look like him.
Jerry Wolski talks about children not being allowed to be stupid any more. He says kids seems to have to have a diagnosis...they either have ADD or some such thing....not just that they inherited somebody's 'stupid genes'.
Do you remember when they used to refer to underwear as "drawers"? Men had long underwear with a "trap door" at the back. I can only surmize that in freezing cold winters, with outdoor toilets, these inventions were ever so valuable for the male population. Women had no such luxury. They don't seem as popular any more. In the winter there were no clothes dryers, so everything got hung outside on the clothes line. Of course, in 40 below temperatures everything hung out would freeze into a stiff unit...including the long underwear. If you have never seen this, you don't know what you're missing. Remember, hanging stuff out in that temperature killed all sorts of things from lice to viruses and all that!
I was teaching my four-year old grandson to play hide and seek". I know the count is to 100, but I decided to do a shortened version and just count to 10. He hid his face under a pillow on the couch in full view of me, but I called the age-old, "here I come, ready or not you must be caught!"....There was the typical laughing and tickling when he was "found" and then it was his turn to count. I said, "Now you count to 10, but he said, "No, I'll count to 12." You had to be there, I heard his mother laugh out loud from the other room. It's bad when your four-year old grandchild thinks you can only count to 10.
For a short time in about the seventies, people started calling little kids "rug rats". Honestly. I thought it had died down, but I saw today that there is a kid's cartoon on TV with the same name. Oh brother.
Sometime in the past few decades, everything was some kind of "wonder". You could be anything from a "gutless wonder" to a "one-hit wonder".
Here's a spin-off from the Dukes of Hazzard TV show. My son was about two years old and a big fan of the Duke Boys. As you may know, the sherriff on this show was Rosco P. Coltrain. I have a cousin, Ross, who is a little older than me. Ross used to visit us quite often and since we called him Rosco, my son soon began to call him "Rosco Peko-train". It was very cute and soon members of my extended family were also calling Ross - "Rosco Peko-train" or shortened to "Rosco Peko". If you put it into perspective, that was at least thirty years ago. We moved away from that community and a few years ago, I happened to be talking to a neighbour of Ross's. Somehow, she innocently referred to him as Rosco Peko. Startled, I told her about what had happened so many years ago with my little son. She said, "yea, she knew all about it and ...it stuck!". WOW! Unbelievable.
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