crossing the lines

For those of you who know me, you know my speech tends to be peppered with many (perhaps too many) references--popular or otherwise. Not that I go all Dennis Miller with the esoterica, but I do feel free to voice whatever line or reference seems to be situationally appropriate and happens to be synaptically collocated in this overstuffed attic I call my brain.

This habit may have developed very early. Among my familiars growing up, those best of best friends Carrington Nelson (now Carrington Fox)and Jonathan Harwell, we were so intensely connected that often entire conversations or emotional states were conveyed by shorthand quotes from an earlier experiences, from our own lives or from the screen.

These days it may be that the unexpected reference has become one of my conversational hallmarks. It's no wonder I love MST3K. And the rare clever shout at Midnight Mass.

So I really dig these guys. At first I just thought it was cute, cleaver, and fag funny. Then I realized how much hard work must have gone into making this: remembering/picking the lines, finding them, sampling them, editing them into a dialog, and then the rehearsing and the shooting and the editing.

I can't imagine pantomiming this in public with a straight face. Or investing that much time. I may have mastered the random quip, but these fags are dedicated.

I just wonder what they could do if they expanded the repetoire beyond the five or so movies they sampled.

Enjoy.

Speak Up by Randy Eisenberg