We watch... so you don't have to.
So Fat, Fatso
So I turned to the love of my life and said, "Darling, would you like me to cause a series of sequential images to appear on our cathode ray tube, such that we may be amused for a period of time?" For her part, Dawn grunted noncomittally. I translated that as, "Play with the remote all you want, I'm just waiting until I fall asleep on this here comfy couch."
The TV was surprisingly broken. There was just absolutely nothing on, despite the nine billion or so channels we receive through DirecTV. I couldn't even put on Gitanas with the sound off, which is what I generally do when I get really bored.
Then I spied, on the usually unwatchable HBO Family channel, a movie I haven't seen since -- and this should ring a distant bell for New Yorkers -- it was on Wometco Home Theater in the early 1980s. The film was "Fatso," starring the inimitable Dom DeLuise.
If you can't write the entire screenplay yourself from just those two bits of information, you need to ask your gardener to give you more water and maybe a nitrogen fertilizer.
I loved that movie. Mainly because it starred Dom DeLuise. He plays a fat Italian guy named Dominic whose even fatter cousin dies before his fortieth birthday, leading Dom to try to lose weight. In my memory, much hilarity ensued.
In real life, I discovered, watching the movie last night, much hilarity failed to ensue for quite a few minutes at a time.
After a little bit I turned to my wife, who was rapidly entering her evening coma, and said, "The really funny thing about this is, Dom DeLuise in this movie isn't really very fat. He's not as fat as he is now, that's for sure. In fact, he's not even as fat as I am now."
Another grunt emanated from the vicinity of the other end of the couch, which I translated as, "Turn off the TV already, you idiot, and carry me up to bed." So I turned off the TV and fired up the forklift.
This morning, for fun, I checked Roger Ebert's review of "Fatso" from 1980. He gave it one single star, presumably because most of the movie was shot in focus, and closed his review with this: "I don't want to be picky, but... Dom DeLuise isn't really that fat."
Across the span of decades, Roger Ebert and I agree. I hereby invite him to share my couch with me and my wife.
