Thursday, January 24, 2008

Chickens and the Multi-Talented

Wow, it has been a long time, friends! Too long. And I'm afraid it will get worse before it gets better, as we have entered the beginning of our long busy season here in our little office.

First things first, the most important development is that Leigh's baby finally made HER appearance to the world on Friday, January 11th. Lovely Elizabeth was born a few days past due, weighing in at a terrific 9 lbs, 5 oz. Mom and Dad and little one are all doing well and we've all been to visit, of course! Leigh actually brought her by just this week, and she is already growing and strong. So exciting!

Well, back to today and our always lively discussions. As usual, things started off with discussions of entertainment, in this case, television. A certain faction of our group (myself included) were very excited that just one week from today our favorite show, LOST, comes back with new episodes! Earl and Claire, meanwhile, confessed that they had watched the new show "Moment of Truth," where contestants answer questions while strapped to a lie detector, all to win big money. We debated for a while as to the merits of watching such a show (sample quote from me: "Congratulations, you now have no soul.") and considered that perhaps the money contestants won could be put towards the lawsuits and divorce proceedings they would most likely have to go through on account of their "honesty."



This devolved into a discussion of how one could "fool" a polygraph - like the character in Ocean's 13 stepping on a tack. From there we moved to other types of tests - drug tests, breathalyzers - and how one might also fool these tests. Marie was eating something with poppyseeds, prompting a warning that they could actually cause a positive result on a drug test. (Ryan corroborated this fact by remarking that it had been proven true on "Mythbusters.")

Talking about drug tests caused half the crowd to dissolve into quoting lines from our other favorite show, "The Office." Shannon, who doesn't watch the show, said quietly while observing us, "It's like another language."


Somehow this led to Marie running off to her desk to print out a joke that W sent to her. We were a little alarmed when she came back with about 5 sheets of paper ("How long is this joke!?!") but soon were giggling at the various celebrity "answers" to the age-old question, "Why did the chicken cross the road?" We pondered how others at our table would answer the question: Earl would ask how much it was going to cost for the chicken to cross the road, Webster's answer would be full of long words we didn't understand, etc.


After the chicken banter died down, we switched gears and talked about the continuing sad news of actor Heath Ledger's death. Marie mentioned that she'd had Brokeback Mountain in her Netflix queue for a while, and that since his death, the wait list had grown even more.

This led to an open discussion of movies we had or hadn't seen recently. I mentioned that my husband had gone to see Cloverfield, and gave it a "meh" review. We digressed into monster and scary movies of other kinds. Marie polled the group as to whether Jurassic Park was too scary for her kids to see. The general consensus was probably so, especially since the younger one had recently been frightened at an outdoor showing of E.T. at a local theatre.

From there the conversation turned to where else one could see outdoor movies shown locally. Shannon piped up that she and her husband had gone to see a movie at a "lawnchair" theatre in a quaint little country hamlet located near our city. I teased that along with your movie you could probably get some good ole' moonshine, too. Jorge followed up with a joke about "those darn Duke boys."


...which prompted Marie to mention that that was another movie she never saw, The Dukes of Hazzard, which prompted Deasy to offer her opinion on which Duke boy was the cutest, which somehow prompted someone else to bring up another buddy-team television show from that era, "Starsky & Hutch." Jorge and Marie wracked their brains trying to remember the name of the hit song that Hutch (actor David Soul) had recorded.

And THAT, my friends, is how we segued into our final topic of the day, which was actors who have crossed over into singing careers (or the other way around). We covered the good, the bad, and the mediocre (most fell into the latter category).

At long last, W dropped in for a visit and immediately knew the answer to the song title in question... "Don't Give Up On Us." Of course!





And that is how a very long and VERY involved lunch club came to an end.


Until next time,


Liz

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Impressive memory, Liz! Oh, and I am looking forward to gaining a bit more of an "insider's perspective" as I will be watching some episodes of The Office very soon. Talk about being in the dark!