Suddenly, Bob sat up.
The applause and my crying stopped.
He looked at me.
“We made a movie about 60 or 70 years ago,” he said. “Do you remember that?”
I nodded.
“We had a couple Betamax players and hooked them together. Then we got some cheap beer, think it was Keystone, and, since it was the 80’s, we had mounds and mounds of cocaine.”
“I remember that!” I said. “We were quite decadent!”
“Yes! One day, after we were done selling greeting cards door-to-door in order to get fabulous prizes, we went to an abandoned strip club in the deep dark bowels of Omaha, hooked those Betamax players up, climbed a utility pole in order to get some illegal electricity, started snortin’ and drinkin’ and within three days we made our movie! Most of it in color!”
“Well, I’m the one who climbed the pole. You had a cattle prod and forced me to climb. But yes. Yes! We did!”
“I was, and still am too small to climb poles,” Bob said excitedly. “I’m pretty sure we danced a bit too, because of the coke. Yup! Coke-fueled dancin’. Those were the days!”
“Yes they were!” I exclaimed, matching Bob’s excitement. “Then we showed the finished movie at a funeral, and they were MIGHTY impressed!”
“Yes they were!”
“Then we never showed it again and it’s been hopelessly lost!”
“And all the people at the funeral who watched it are now dead!”
Our excitement disappeared.
“But wait!” said Bob, his excitement suddenly back again.
“Yes?” I asked, my excitement now back again as well.
“I found it!” Bob said. “In a box of paper clips!”
“No. Way!” I said.
“YES!” he said. “Now all we need to do is find a Betamax player!”
“IMPOSSIBLE!” I replied.
“No matter!” he said. “We can use a VHS player!”
“But how?”
“We just need to take the chip out of the Betamax cassette and put it into a VHS cassette.”
“YES! And then we just need to toss in a couple handfuls of ball bearings because it’s all ball bearings nowadays!”
“Definitely yes! Then we take a working or even non-working VHS player, hook it into a DVD player and copy the tape to disc and we’ll be able to show it at wakes and funerals and baby’s first birthday!”
“WE’LL BE FAMOUS!” I screamed.
“MORE THAN FAMOUS!” Bob screamed. “WE’LL BE MORE FAMOUS AND POWERFUL THAN THOSE GREEK GODS!”
We were both brutally pummeled into unconsciousness quite suddenly for some odd reason.
Lunatic Ravings is posted each Saturday.
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