The surviving members of "Monty Python's Flying Circus" performed their final show together last night in England. (Graham Chapman died in 1989. Look him up in Wikipedia -- John Cleese gave him the best eulogy ever!) I grew up on "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and my first performance of note (my English teacher said that "some of us had real talent" {that left him with an out -- was it me or someone else?}) was a knock off sketch with the character of "Timmy Williams" played by me! They were an extraordinarily funny group -- of course, we all know the "dead parrot" sketch and the "ministry of funny walks" and the "complaint department" and the "world class twit contest" and the "summarize Proust competition" and so many more great sketches. Some of you have performed "The Top of the Form Sketch" from In Character (and for those of you who missed doing it, I'm sorry, because it's a killer). If you haven't seen any of these sketches, look them up. They are belly laugh inducing and wonderfully inventive.
One of the funniest movies of all time is "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and as I recall "The Life of Brian" is also a laugh riot (although I haven't seen it for years). All the Pythons are in their 70's and I guess it is hard to mount a show and perform every night (well, I know it is) so I understand the desire to hang up the fancy dress and the lumberjack suit. The glory of nowadays is that you don't need them to keep performing because you can probably access most of their great material on Youtube.
We spent a few days with my buddy in Kelowna. We actually saw flaming forest fires on the way there. The fires were what seemed like inches away from people's houses. What would that be like? We had a super time swimming and talking (that would be Myrna and me) and go-carting and driving around in all Kevin's fancy automobiles (that would be the fellas). Myrna is in this book club and they are reading a very complicated, dense and meandering book (called Infinite Jest -- I would say I was fairly well read and know quite a bit about books, but I had never heard of it, even though it is apparently some sort of big "cult" read). She has taken on the reading of the book as a bit of a project, but she's not really enjoying it much and is afraid to comment on it for fear the other people think her comments are stupid. I got a great idea for a story that I should write (but it's got to sit in my head for a while because I think it would be complicated itself) about this kind of Machiavelian woman who puts together this book club to read this complicated postmodern tome and gets the people to meet in a hipster bar (this part has actually happened) and the people are all really varied and you could include their posts about the book and the woman's initial invitation and you could even include parts of the so-called book itself! Maybe this will be my life's work, if the government continues the lockout past the summer. (I hope that doesn't happen.)
No comments:
Post a Comment