Gummy Guy

Pretty much done with weed. The last few times that I've inhaled socially, I didn't like the result. The effect of the weed was overwhelming. Felt like being super drunk and not in a good way.

Puffing days are over. I don't know if the weed is getting that much stronger or that it has a different effect the older that we get. Even Paul swore off weed a few years back once he reached his seventies.

Weed is growing more and more legal around the states and I'm told comes in different levels of potency.

A few months ago, a couple of our close friends came visiting from Florida. As a gift, they gave us several cannabis gummies. We appreciated their generosity and "stashed" them away.

We had a rough day yesterday. In response to some sobering news about one of our friends and looking for faith, we started listening to Elvis gospel songs. After dinner during which we played and replayed "If I Can Dream", we decided to watch an Elvis movie to keep the vibe going and to prepare more fully for when we see the Baz version of Elvis next week.

Before the movie, Lynn brought out the gummies. We figured what the hell. We started chewing and damn, they tasted great. We took our positions on the couch and played a few more Elvis spirituals.His amazing grace is straight from God

The thing about weed is you feel the effects almost immediately. After chewing the gummies, I felt relaxed and unchanged. We picked out Jailhouse Rock which is famous for its choreography. Jailhouse Rock was made before Elvis went into the Army. He was still considered a threat to much of America who though that Rock and Roll was the Devil's music. 

I remember going to the movie in the day and remembered it even more clearly after chewing and while sitting comfortably on our couch. 

The theater was packed. The girls were screaming throughout the movie especially when Elvis is shirtless. They moaned when Elvis was tied to the whipping post. The word was out that Elvis was gonna have a haircut in the movie. At the time, Elvis had the most famous hair in the world. I recalled being shocked like the rest of the audience when Elvis got a butcher cut in the jailhouse to which he bad been committed for killing a man in a fistfight that was more like self defense.

I had forgotten about the gummie. Just feeling good.

The movie was progressing along smoothly in black and white and Cinemascope. Elvis playing the role of Vince Everitt had served his time and while in jail had discovered his singing talent. Upon leaving jail, Vince and his female partner started their own record label. Vince became an overnight sensation.

One night, Vince was holding a blowout party in his apartment. He had been ignoring his partner for awhile as they were getting tangled up in feelings for one another. Vince was starting to become cold hearted and was flirting with another woman when all of a sudden his partner appeared at the party and saw Vince nibbling at the neck of a blonde floozie.

She paused at the top of the stairs. Vince looked up from his nibbling and spotted her. He headed over to confront her and straighten everything out.

That's when I noticed a weird background guy.

The scene played out. The guy was in a few frames before he disappeared into the "party". Shortly after he disappeared, I asked Lynn "did you see that guy?". We might have said the same thing to each other at the same time because later a hilarious debate ensued about who had seen him first.

We agreed that we had never seen anything like him in the two seconds that he was in frame.

We wanted to make sure that our eyes weren't playing tricks on us.

"let's rewind"

We rewound the scene a couple times. Sure enough the guy was there and he was somehow stealing the scene from Vince and his partner even though he didn't say a word. His hair was stealing the scene from the hair of Elvis. Who was this guy and what was he doing in this scene much less the movie. 

After watching the scene a couple of times and even twice in slow motion, we wondered if we had ever seen a guy make an appearance like that in any movie we had ever seen. We were laughing every time we looked at it. 

We wondered if the guy would show up again in the movie. We watched carefully. The guy never returned. We went back to the beginning of the film and fast forwarded all the way to the party scene. We knew the guy didn't show up after the party and we discovered that the guy hadn't shown up before the party. Dude was in just that one scene for maybe two seconds during which time he sorta snapped his fingers but not quite and sorta smoked but not quite.

We began to speculate on a back story for not only the character but also for the actor playing that character. How was he cast? Who figured out where to put him in the frame? Did he ever make another movie? Was he a personal friend of Elvis? Would he show up on the credits. Had he spent the rest of his life telling his friends and relatives how he had been in Jailhouse Rock.? How during one shot, he had been framed by the stars of the movie?

We went back to the scene one more time and noticed something else. As Elvis walked over to confront his female partner, he passed several couple who were "rocking out" on the dance floor. We noticed another guy, almost as weird. This guy was wearing a suit and dancing with a blonde who seemed overjoyed to be dancing with him. The guy himself was having the time of his life. He was a big guy, in his thirties and he was having an obviously loaded ball. Elvis walked right by that couple towards the staircase upon which stood his pissed off female partner and the guy who was attempting to out hair Elvis.

We watched Elvis walk past the dancing couple a few more times. We freeze framed the delighted blonde and giggled at how exuberant/ecstatic she was while dancing for two with a very unattractive overweight guy in a bad suit. What the hell was she so happy about?

We did some quick math. If the blonde had been 30 when she was cast for the dance party she had to be close to 90 now if she had somehow survived. We imagined the auditioning for that part.

Then we went back to the guy who had first caught our attention, we watched him walk out of frame and disappear forever.

Somewhere during all this, we remembered chewing the Gummys which made us laugh even harder.

I felt more like myself than I had in years.

Then we watched Plan 9 from Outer Space which is a whole other story but nowhere near as vivid as the Gummy guy.

The next morning, we were still chortling about the Gummy guy. I decided I had to write about him. I knew that I would have a hard time describing the guy so I replayed the movie in order to take a picture of him from the teevee screen and have that serve as 1,000 words.

I got to the point where he first appears and to my shock...he wasn't there.

We had imagined the whole thing under the influence of the gummy!

Whoa.

Just kidding.

He was there. I snapped a few pictures off the screen.

Check out the Gummy Guy.

Maybe check out a legal gummy.