The Stars!

by Q. William Bacon

 

I’m at a hotel high in the Hollywood hills. I’m hanging upside-down on the exercise bar but I can still reach down and type on my laptop. This carbonated bull semen energy drink has really got my engine started!

Upside-down, the lights of LA look like a glorious Rodeo Drive chandelier shop. But those streets are filled with struggling actors trying to break into show biz. Who can tell who will be discovered and become famous, and who will be sucked into streets melted into tar pits by the merciless LA sun, reduced to bones, discovered by archaeologists, displayed in a museum, and become famous? Here’s how it works:

  • A sushi-slurping talent agent sees a woman pasting braille advertisements on bus seats and yells, “Get me that girl!” and in a week she’s recorded an infomercial for Sneezercizer, a sneezing powder that works the abs like nothing you’ve ever experienced.
  • A cigar-chomping mogul watches the Prenatal Ultrasound Channel and yells, “Get me that guy!” and years later the spokesfetus is the voice of a generation saying, “Prunes – They’re like freebasing plums and injecting them into your forehead for a life-threatening blast of fruit flavor!”
  • A baseball-cap-wearing director sees a CPR training dummy and yells, “Get me that girl!” and a month later the dummy’s model is an extra in the movie “Us!”, a remake of “Them!” but told from the point of view of the gigantic mutant ants.
  • A martini-tossing producer glancing out of his BMW sees a homeless actor practicing signing his autograph while urinating in an alleyway and yells, “Get me that guy!” and a day later the actor is starring as the murderous army doctor in the thriller, “Turn Your Head And Scream”.
  • An antacid-chomping multimedia whiz kid watching a bank security camera sees a woman hold up the place and yells “Get me that girl!” and a week later the woman is covered with fluffernutter dancing in a hanging bamboo POW cage in the new music video by the Blister Pak, four angry young rappers with Tourette’s Syndrome.

Hanging upside-down, I see the lights of LA as they really are: A sky filled with a million blazing stars!