Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Sunday, April 13, 2003 The Pitch: It's like Top Gun meets Cabaret (meets Kuffs)! So, this dream I had last night. I was with Patrick on a hill overlooking an air force base, watching the soldiers come home from the war. As I look through binoculars, I can see maintenance guys hosing off fighter jets in the warm yellow sunshine of the afternoon. As I watch, a tan shirtless marine takes his girlfriend, lies with her on his surfboard and they ride the runoff down the side of the hill. They're both laughing, and it's a heartwarming thing to watch, but I can't help but wonder about the all the chemicals, jet fuel and such, in the runoff and how it might affect them later.Patrick, tired of waiting for his turn with the binoculars turns to the side of the hill and watches soldiers and their girlfriends walk off on leave. One of the girls yells over her shoulder to another departing group: "Stop acting so intransigent!" Patrick looks over the hill, puts his hands to his lips and hollers, "I always said I'd marry a woman who could use 'intransigent' properly." "Don't get us in trouble," I say to him. "Don't worry about it," he says, and I'm glad he's changed. In the old days, he would have started a fight, although this is exactly the sort of thing he would do then. The next thing I know, we're in the large kitchen of a Victorian, drinking with a bunch of soldiers and their girlfriends. I look over and see Christian Slater with a group of friends, unhappily pouring himself a glass of Gin. Just as he's about to take a drink, I say, "Christian, wait." He looks over at me, angry and defensive and I say, "I don't mean to bother you. But i saw an article with you on tv last week where you were talking about how important sobriety is to you. If you want to, you can not drink, and we can go rent some videos down the street." He looks at me, defiantly but with a trace of vulnerabilty, then puts down the drink. "Okay," he says. "Sure." So now he, Patrick, several friends and I are all going downstairs to get videos. After several wrong turns looking for the restroom, I end up downstairs outside the front door. Christian Slater and his friends are already ahead of us, walking up the street, and Patrick turns to me, and says, "We should rent 'Jamboree.'" "Great idea! That's the perfect musical for a time like this. And I start singing the theme song to 'Jamboree'; "Life is a Jamboree, old chum/ so come to the---" and then I pause. "Wait a minute. That's the theme song to 'Cabaret.' How does the theme song to 'Jamboree' go?" And that's when I wake up, but not before remembering everything I know about Jamboree, which is the reason for this whole entry. Jamboree is a late-60s musical, in its way very much like Cabaret in terms of handling dark subject material and light musical numbers. In Jamboree, Robert Shaw is the leader of a New Orleans jazz band that specializes in jazz funerals. As he and his friends drink themselves to death, the band's extravagant New Orleans street numbers get dizzier and dizzier, brighter and brighter, more and more euphoric, even as more of them die in horrible, lonely ways. At the end, we see Shaw, on his last big bender, the centerpiece of a triumphant, ecstatic Mardi Gras parade, blowing his trumpet wildly, singing, dancing, and the camera closes in on him as he sweats and laughs, and gives it his showbiz all, and then the camera pulls back and we see him, alone, by himself, dancing and sweating and drunkenly singing, alone, down a lone country road to the graveyard. And I woke up, got up to pee, thinking about all this and thinking "How can there not be a musical called Jamboree with Robert Shaw as a drunken New Orleans band leader?" And now that it's 11:33 a.m. Sunday morning, awake and listening to the sounds of traffic on Edi's street, I still want to know. posted by Jeff Lester | 11:32 AM | |
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