NOTES ON #2
NOTES ON #2
"BUSINESS TRIP"
This poem connects with the Season 1 episode of The Muppet Show
featuring Sandy Duncan!
featuring Sandy Duncan!
& I like to call it my "low brow" poem, because it moves nice & slow in true yellow style. Yeah, mellow yellow, man. I like 2 use it to call out all those "high brow" poets who think poetry is more sacred than taking a #2 TOO! For all you "high brow" readers who love it because it is to be loved, for all you friends out there, what can I say, I'm sorry, I don't have any Gags working for me!!
& Who would have ever thought I (my twin brother) would become the sober babysitter one day? Certainly not me, or him...
& The episode opens up with Kermit getting blasted up high to the balcony. Right away, this poem explores what it might mean to “get blasted.” "They say," actually, if U smoke a banana peel, U can have hallucinations..."
& Drugs can deconstruct or reconstruct the fabric of time which make it a thematic idea within this madcap piece of structure and spatial chaos. Another theme is sight, because drugs slant perceptions of how we see reality, and Sandy Duncan only has good vision in one of her eyes.
& "The banana sketch" which everyone is “in on” except for Kermit, holds its own secret reference. Season 1's head writer was Jack Burns, who was a host of Saturday Night Live in its second season. (SNL featured Jim Henson's “Land of Gorch” Muppets in its first.) If you watch that episode of SNL, the opening to this poem suddenly will begin to make more sense, even though it's total nonsense. You see? Essentially, my entire book of poems consists of countless inside jokes, so I am asking the audience
(all y'all) to appreciate what is being done, all while not requiring any real connections having to be made in order to get something from the reality of each poem. In the epigram, before the poem even starts, I am gagging over the way references make references. all the while, simply talking about the whole business of bananas.
& The closing number in this episode, “Try to Remember,” is from the long-running musical, The Fantasticks, where two men created a wall, invisible to the audience, to try and trick their children.
& Sandy is the only guest star in the first season of The Muppet Show who is seen all alone in the opening, not surrounded by any Muppet, after her introduction by Kermit during the theme song. In this episode, Gonzo the Great sings Alex Rogers & Bert Williams’s song, “Nobody.”
& This episode features the lyrical version of "Never Smile at a Crocodile" from Disney's animated feature, Peter Pan. That song was never included in the film. Coincidentally, imagine, Sandy Duncan would go on to take the lead role of Peter Pan on Broadway later in time...
🍌🍌
WOULD YOU LIKE TO READ IT AGAIN?!
No, of course it won't be like the first time...
Maybe read it while taking a
#2
?