It's Got A Good Beat, And You Can Dance To it. Now.

I know a very cool chick named Beatrice. I got her in to audition for Pink Piggy (four of the actors cast were because I got them in the room. So it pays to be a friend o’ mine, but you also want to be a kick ass actor) and she was cast in the room as a slightly deranged karaoke singer, which, if you know Beatrice, is perfect for her, and that’s meant as a big compliment.

In the script, this slightly deranged karaoke singer sings a little ditty called (I used to have the title here, but had to take it down) The lyrics are exactly what you’re thinking they would be from a song with that kind of title, kind of like you bastard, I’m awesome, can’t you tell, I’m having a nervous breakdown right now because you can’t tell, look at how bold I’m being, I’m metaphorically slitting my wrist in front of you in song! Aren’t I cool now? AREN’T I COOL NOW, YOU MOTHERTRUCKER! But I didn’t pay that much attention to the lyrics when I was writing them because I was writing this script while drunk at 2am in 2002, and I was writing just for me, and we were never gonna make this movie anyway.

But six years later, yes we are, and I never got a chance to polish the song, so the individual lines of the verses are mismatched rhythmically, I don’t like the first two lines, and I used to have them posted here, but I had to take 'em down because I value my privacy, sorry.

But what Beatrice ended up doing was taking the song to her stepfather, who wrote an arrangement for it, and then took it to another friend of hers, who had a band, and another friend did a mix of it, and all of the sudden, a CD lands in front of me at a sushi restaurant last night, courtesy of Beatrice.

And the song is f’ing awesome now. It’s got STRINGS. A MANDOLIN. I remember thinking that nobody could really sing that lyric that I had to take down And have it fit in a certain tempo, but Beatrice and her buddies not only figured that part out, they made it sound GREAT. Beatrice wrote in the liner notes Everyone who contributed to this zany thing did so because they found the whole thing funny, and the song oddly charming…and because I told them it was going to be an awesome film.

I’m once again stunned at how things can take a life of their own outside of my original intentions for it. And thank GOD for it, because what I do is just the base coat. Everyone else brings their layers to it and make it much much better.

Beatrice also told me the HI-larious story of her four year old nephew, who was cast in his church’s Easter pageant. (I love those kind of potential train wrecks. My church is too cool to do anything like that, so God bless the Midwest.) “Was he Pontius Pilate? Was he a fleeing apostle? Was he one of the accusers? Was he one of the guards that rolled dice for Jesus’ clothes?” Nope, Four Year Old Nephew was cast as an angel (I think all the four year olds were cast as part of the heavenly host.) but rehearsal went past his bedtime, and he started to throw a fit, so his Mom bundled him up and hauled him out of the church, and Four Year Old Nephew starts screaming, “Nooooooooo! I wanna see Jesus! I WANNA SEE JESUS!!!”

Oh man. I do too, little buddy. I do too.

:)