What A Long, Strange Trip

The problem with Christmas break is that Mrs. Hillbilly Mom does not want to use her time for constructive endeavors such as lesson plans or house cleaning. Is it not enough that she loads her spawn with carbs? After all, there are TV marathons to be watched, and books to be read, and the internet to be surfed.

Why, just today, Mrs. HM undertook quite an unplanned journey through the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com), a long and winding road that makes no sense to anybody but Mrs. HM. And she, herself, could probably not make the same trip again. At times, she veered from the beaten path to google, or simply down the back roads of her mind. Which is always a dangerous trip. If you plan to read further, fasten your seatbelt. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

It all started with that durn Planet of the Apes, which reminded me that I'd seen the book at the town library, heavily guarded by those cranky old spinsters who work there by volunteering. I knew that I wanted to read it sometime. It was on the bottom shelf, on the lefthand side, near the beginning of an aisle. That's how Mrs. HM's mind works. Kind of like Hannibal Lecter's, which is described in either The Silence of the Lambs, or Hannibal, wherein Mr. H. Lecter's memory is a kind of museum with compartments, and everything is in its place.

So I thought of Pierre Boulle, the author of Planet of the Apes, and I recalled that he also wrote Bridge on the River Kwai. Who knew? Only a true bibliophile, perhaps. And when I thought of that Bridge on the River Kwai movie, I remembered that whistling song, and that it was also used in a kind of parody in Walt Disney's The Parent Trap. The 1961 version with Hayley Mills, which also starred Maureen O'Hara and Brian Keith, who did a movie with Juliet Mills called The Rare Breed, in which they whistled God Save the Queen to make a Hereford bull follow them. But that's neither here nor there, because Maureen O'Hara also made a little movie called The Quiet Man with John Wayne, who is not such a good actor, but won an Oscar for his role in True Grit, which starred and even worse actor, Glen Campbell, and a pretty good actor, Robert Duvall. One of my favorite Robert Duvall movies is Tender Mercies, in which he plays a down and out country singer, and his ex-wife, played by Bettye Buckley, is a more successful country singer along the lines of Loretta Lynn. That got me to thinking about my special favorite country singer from that time, Dolly Parton, who did a little album called 'Trio' with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. We all know that Emmylou put out that themed album called The Ballad of Sally Rose, which got me to thinking about a little-known movie called Wild Rose, which was an independent film starring Lisa Eichhorn, made in 1985, which was based on the story of a woman trying to do a man's job driving big loaders in the Mesabi Iron Range of Minnesota, and all the harassment she endured, which surely sounds like that Charlize Theron movie, North Country, which was not as good. Oh, and Charlize Theron played that serial killer, Aileen Wuornos, in the movie Monster, which had already been done for TV as Overkill: The Aileen Wuorns Story, starring Jean Smart, who was Charlene on Designing Women. Once Charlene left the show, she was replaced by her sister, Carlene, played by Jan Hooks, one of my favorite all-time cast members of Saturday Night Live. Let's not forget an original cast member, Dan Aykroyd, and Bill Murray, who stepped up when Chevy Chase left. Which brings us to a little movie Dan and Bill were in, called Ghostbusters, also starring Ms. Sigourney Weaver, who received a best actress Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Diane Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist. Which brings us full circle back to APES!

Funny how that happens.