#108

"IRL"

        in Landlocked

One of my friends was darling enough to translate Jean-Pierre Rampal’s address to Miss Piggy for me. He says to her: “Your tanned body is so delicate, I suppose your skin must be so tender that only thinking about it, my mouth gets watery.”

& In the "Bear on Patrol" sketch, the license number to the machine without a driver is ZZXKL (pronounced "sick" "skull"). The plate inspired me to title this piece IRL.  I had recently learned the figure of speech to mean "in real life" which was how this piece was born. 

& I was revisiting the NBC drama, ER, when the Muppets called out to me. In one ER episode, this episode of The Muppet Show is featured! Certainly there are many episodes that feature Vet’s Hospital, a spoof on medical dramas, but this episode features this terrific number about a heart beat: & so there are more than a few  words which reference the hospital.

& The conga line concept is interesting here, because it is a great way of explaining what happens in Pied Piper of Hamlin. It’s another fairy tale that disturbed me as a child, and it is featured in the finale of this episode in Season 5 of TMS. 

& Of the primal appeal of the flute, Rampal once told the Chicago Tribune: "For me, the flute is really the sound of humanity, the sound of man flowing, completely free from his body almost without an intermediary[...] Playing the flute is not as direct as singing, but it's nearly the same." 

& You will find many greens in this episode, including green metal chairs used in a scene right by the river, la Seine. Interestingly, it harks (forward in time) to the Muppets Tonight! episode featuring Cyndi Crawford. She was a supermodel, like Candice Bergen was. Bergen’s muppoem is a French OULIPO, inspired by Miss Piggy’s desire to pretend she is French. I remember laughing in the streets of Paris with my friend, mentioned at the beginning, about which super models we fancied ourselves as.

& I learnt in school that if it’s not Baroque, fix it.

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"IRL"