We all have one of those friends whose sole purpose in our lives is to enrich it by any means possible and I am grateful I have one in my friend Irene (yes, my BFF and I share the same first name, and my brother shared the same one with his BFF, which always delighted my Dad when the four of us were in the same room). I met her in the sixth grade when I was a new girl at her school. We were introduced to each other for no other reasons than the fact we both shared the same name. Later that day, I saw her walking home and turned into a street so close to mine that I could see her house through my bedroom window. Funny how I’ve never noticed her before. We ended up being BFFs not only due to the close proximity of our homes and that we were classmates for three solid years, but because she was insanely creative. She’s the one who introduced to me great many things that are now the main staple of my cultural diet. We saw dozens of Broadway plays and hundreds of movies together, we nerded out over Monty Python and Murphy Brown and The Kids in the Hall and Gordon Korman books and show tunes and we played Barbies well into our late teens because that’s our way of acting out plot lines for our potential screenplays/novels. We didn’t do any of the normal teenage girl things like joyriding in her father’s jalopy (the only places we took the rust bucket out to was to Kohl’s in the summer to get away from the heat or to Princeton Review to enhance our SAT scores). If podcasts were available back then we’d definitely have our own program, judging by the hundreds of cassette tapes featuring us acting out all the parts to a never ending epic saga of a poor immigrant from a fictitious island nation and marrying the rebellious daughter of a theatre owner. This includes recordings of us butchering musicals as these colourful characters we’ve created complete with radio shock jocks forced to air these recordings and original commercial ads from made up sponsors. Our mothers were witnesses to these recordings and I’m certain they wished we were blasting New Kids on the Block or painting our nails or sneaking booze to add to our 7-Eleven Slurpees and hanging out with boys at the school parking lot instead of spending our weekends pretending to be drug dealers crashing a helicopter into the Minskoff Theatre for the evacuation scene in “Miss Saigon.”
Till this day my friend is still recommending all sorts of things I will never have discover on my own, one of them being a Brian De Palma rock musical horror comedy extravaganza called “Phantom of the Paradise.” My friend, who is now a mother of four, took a break one day from running after her kids and put on this very movie and immediately decided I needed to, no, must, see it as well. If we were still in our teens we’d be down in my basement watching this film over and over. On top of the right kind of camp, the music is fantastic and my only regret is that I couldn’t watch it with her.
This movie has inspired me to paint a set of the Phantom dolls and she will be the recipient of it…who better to have it in her home (and on a high enough shelf so the members of her younger brood won’t get their hands on it)?
We discussed this movie at great lengths but it still took me over a year to get my act together and churn it out. I finally found some free time and was able to finish what I started. It was great fun putting it together.
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