Dan Mooney

This post is like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and too many others like it: A sorely late if not entirely unwelcome addition to a long-finished series. In my case, it was a series of posts originally part of another blog entirely – guess the name – relating a long, winding, long-winded tale of my reckless youth (and baseball). It began with a prologue, which I hope you’ll take with a grain of salt given that I was six months out of grad school and clinging to the falling sands of my education. The nutshell version is that I did a questionable something and needed a lawyer, and the fake name I gave that lawyer in my bloggy retelling was “Elaine Gillies.”

That story, the night it began, and the months that followed, is simply a part of my personal mythology. It’s not particularly funny or inspiring and I am not particularly heroic but my interest in it is more in the narrative and the nexus of happenings that happened. So much happened for it all to come together the way it did that, well, if it wasn’t a religious thing or a fate thing it was at least a thread of immutable order amidst the proverbial chaos. And now here I am, six-and-a-half years post-ordeal, five-and-a-half since I wrote up the damn thing, and I think it’s all coming back around. A long break, an empty summer, a postponed move to Astoria just in time for my birthday (probably) and a little bit of life later, I’m back where I was, using my mid- to late-20s to move about a mile (probably).

Finally, something I recognize.

This weekend I went to see Silence! The Musical, the comedic, theatrical take on Silence of the Lambs. It’s playing for the rest of the summer at Theatre 80 on St. Mark’s Place. Just an excellent show. Airplane!-style funny with tremendous talent all over the place. Inside, we’re down the couple of steps from street level, printed tickets in hand, trying to find the right line on which to stand, not the will call line, not the line to get into the attached bar next door. Finally able to stand still, still a foot freakishly taller than everyone as usual, my perspective is enhanced by the waiting crowd, generally an older, smaller demographic. A couple of workers patrol the area, taking drink orders for intermission, handing out baskets with lotion in them, one in charge of the velvet rope. And then another lady in a blazer, a dark one with a bright red shirt underneath. Delicately pretty if I may say so, and strangely familiar. I look once and twice, from a number of feet away, and I tell my cotheatregoer, “I think I know her.” We pass the unhinged velvet rope, consider buying a shirt (“Would you *$%# me?“) and get to the door, where the lady in red (and blazer) stands handing out programs.

We take ours, and the swell of people behind me won’t relent for more than a few seconds. But I have to ask, “Is your name Elaine?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Elaine Gillies?” No hesitation now. “You were my attorney once, a [redacted] case in the Bronx. I’m Dan Mooney.”

The name might not have rung a bell but if not Elaine’s a decent enough actress.

I shook her hand twice, shocked to see her, happy I said something. I told her everything worked out okay. Ten seconds lasted a minute. My friend and I peeled away, finding our seats where I told the nuts and bolts of the lawyer story over again, though not in so many words.

I didn’t see Elaine after the show. She might well have vanished, I don’t know. If this whole saga is a story, a play (as I sectioned it) and I’m a player and she’s a player, her new role was completed anyway. But: that’s fucking crazy talk, metaphors run amok: She’s real and I’m real, and everything that happened really did happen. It all might seem codified and dried out because it’s now written, or somehow blurred with fiction because it is just a retelling. Lesson learned, though: The past is gone in one sense but only one. In three others it’s as here as it ever was.

I often wonder why I can’t be obsessed with activities that are truly productive. Along those lines, it took me no time at all to finish the last four seasons of Dexter. Calling up episode after episode brought back vivid memories of LOST, the last show I caught up on so quickly from the beginning. I loved the suspense, but the shows are otherwise pretty different, Dexter’s closest TV relative probably being CSI, another longtime favorite of mine. It was widely assumed I would enjoy Dexter for at least that reason, and it’s proven almost insurmountably true. Dexter, the younger show, has the advantage of being on cable, where language and grisly violence have freer realm. Dexter, by design, balances the professional and personal sides of the characters better, because the show’s central point of suspense is bound to that dichotomy. And I’d say Dexter continues to succeed for a reason why CSI might be seen as faltering: Dexter’s longer view of crime investigation allows for more freedom in storytelling, without seeming like the show is shifting too much in focus. There are crime scenes, but there’s so much else. CSI was, at first, nearly all about the evidence. I loved the mechanics of it, and just as the show itself would indicate, the personalities were incidental, only the science really mattered. But after hundreds of episodes, CSI has had nowhere to go but deep into the personal lives of the characters, there only being so many ways to find single hairs in carpet. Damn it, though, I still want to see it through. Now that I’ve seen Dexter I can watch both shows, and will be sure to in the fall.

On bio, I saw a new documentary called Queen: Days of Our Lives. It covers some of the same territory as an earlier film, Champions of the World, but focuses less on the biographies of the band’s members, instead telling their story album by album. There was plenty of footage I’d never seen, plus two rather new looking interviews with Brian May and Roger Taylor. And these interviews were more candid that others I’m familiar with: They actually expressed some displeasure with some of their recorded material, and the choices they made as a band (e.g. Hot Space). I’m not made joyful by the thought of infighting, but I was impressed by their candor and was very intrigued by the revelation of these compromises, which hinted at the many complications of being in a band, let alone for a long time, let alone one whose style evolves so substantially.

In theatres, I finally saw Bridesmaids. I’d heard forever that this movie’s defining characteristic was its raunchiness – and that for that reason, guys could and should go see it, even by themselves. Well, I liked the movie a lot – it’s long, but I remember having a smile on my face pretty much throughout, which is compliment enough for any movie to put me in such an enduring good mood. I hope it’s not ruining the illusion to say it’s really not all that raunchy. One scene in particular, for sure, but the movie’s not the revolutionary collection of frankness and grossness I might have been led to believe it could be. In fact, it’s actually very sweet movie, and at least theoretically probably a better date movie than most of the romantic comedies I’ve seen sitting next to women. To me, that Bridesmaids bridges that perceived gap so well should be its longest legacy.

Today I saw a guy in a red t-shirt that had “Get a Life” written on it. Above that, a mushroom from Super Mario Bros. But it was a red mushroom, the kind that turns small regular Mario into Super Mario, and not a green mushroom, which provides the extra life. I nearly went over to talk to this guy about it, to ask about the inconsistency, but I knew right then that the t-shirt had won.

I love May, but it’s a little bittersweet, too. The many TV shows I’ve anticipated each week are done or nearly done for the summer, due rest for keeping me entertained for eight months. During the TV season, few ultimately irrelevant things bother me more than sitting down to enjoy a new episode, live, only to see that it’s a repeat (I sat down in this chair for nothing??). But when all the season finales have aired, I feel free. In June, July and August, the weather’s nice and I can be doing anything with my time. Which means I can catch up on TV.

Enter Dexter. I’ve heard forever that I would enjoy the show, and it’s clearly up my alley: I’ve been a CSI apologist for way too long (stay tuned) so the forensics angle fits, plus I generally enjoy most of what Showtime offers. (If Adam Savage can forward the idea that the world is divided into Hammett people and Chandler people, I’d say it might also be divided into Showtime folks and HBO folks. I’m a Showtime folk.) I watched the first season as I usually do with shows on DVD/Netflix: An episode here and there, then two in a row until the last night when I pound out four to finish it.

Dexter is about Dexter Morgan, a forensics analyst and blood spatter expert who also happens to be a serial killer. It’s based on a novel by a man named Jeff Lindsay. The series is set in Miami, but a regular-looking Miami, not the day-glo neon of the Miami of the CSI franchise set there. While I soon got sucked into the story, I was thrown off by the first few episodes. Not by the story, but by the nuts and bolts of it. The lieutenant is a Latina woman, and true to stereotypical TV form, she’s fiery and generally has a bad attitude (think Ana Lucia). And there’s an African-American man with a chip on his shoulder who spouts off a “motherfucker” here and there and also generally has a bad attitude. But the show mitigated these cliches pretty well, smoothing over some of the edges that made these representations one-dimensional and over the top while keeping the characters’ intensity. That’s all that stuck in my craw with this one. Onward to season two!

Stripes

For a long time, this movie’s been on my Life List (aka the What Do You Mean You Haven’t Seen It?? List). I’d just finished reading a book on Saturday Night Live, Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, so it felt right to hit something from that early era. Since I might be the last guy on Earth to see the movie, I’ll assume you know the plot, so I won’t go much into it. But Bill Murray and Harold Ramis play guys unsatisfied in their work, Bill Murray as a photographer/cab driver and Harold Ramis as an English as a Second Language teacher. That they see a commercial for joining the Army is almost incidental – it could have been a commercial for anything more exciting or challenging for them than what they were doing. But much as with Fight Club, this movie speaks to that slacker recklessness, so it’s all the more appropriate for guys of a certain age and disposition i.e. me.

When it comes down to it, two things strike me the most. First is the many connections to the TV show Community: the main character’s last name (Winger) to his smart-aleck demeanor to his motivational speeches, more broadly to a “Will the guilty party step forward?” Fakeout, that old chestnut, which in the movie gets Harold Ramis and in Community gets the whole group, minus Jeff and Britta, at their Habitat for Humanity house in the clip show. It could all be a coincidence but if not it’s a pleasure to see one of the influences. The second thing that struck me, beyond just how pretty Sean Young was, my God, was the pace of the film, for a comedy. Maybe I’ve seen too much recent TV comedy but the gags seemed to move slowly, the dialogue not so crisply. Thirty years is a long time, and it’s hard to criticize one of the many classic movies that paved the way through the 80s, but the movie seemed to me as if from an exceedingly distant era with very different sensibilities. The success stemmed more from the plot and the performers’ charm than from the dialogue, which is to say the movie isn’t as quotable as other comedies that came out soon after it. Curious, is all.