Shall We Dance, With Bananas?

The Film Forum’s double feature of Busby Berkeley’s The Gang’s All Here and Robert Siodmak’s Cobra Woman imparted some timeless wisdom and prompted me to repeatedly wonder if I was somehow dangerously, perhaps permanently, worlds away from sobriety.

Fortunately, the main point of "The Gang’s All Here" is gargantuan dancing fruit, since the central romance made traditional seduction and romance seem less appealing than smelly summertime subway delays at rush hour. Apparently the Land of Love is rich with boring people, tedious conversations, and lots of duplicity. Perhaps that’s not untrue. But we also learned that romance is just a consolation prize for suckers who don’t live in an enchanted world of enormous, undulating bananas.

When the lines of Cadillac-sized bananas frolicked through one another like a dolphin ballet at Sea World, and then did The Wave several times, I was breathless with delight and awe. In fact, I was later told that I was clutching my mouth and shaking my head with incredulity. When the Polka-Dot Polka dance number closed with a close-up of a girl’s frilly, polka-dotty cuff, which morphed into a creepy disembodied cuff-and-hand-shaped cake-looking thing (that also resembled a ham) which then morphed into dancing, glowing hula hoops I knew that this was a transformative experience not just for the cuff-cake-hoops, but for me. The epic closed with disembodied heads singing from polka dots that were swimming around the screen.

Between screenings, after my friends had evaporated to other areas of the theater, an intense-looking man came over and sat behind me and asked me if I could offer any insight onto the Polka-Dot Polka number. He wondered if the assertion that the polka is passé, but polka dots are here to stay was true. I immediately wondered if he was somehow a stalker – of all the strangers in the movie theater, he managed to pick someone who was writing so very recently about this very topic?

He repeated some of the lyrics and then asked if I could remember any others. The social situation was odd, but I gradually became less cautious, and told him about how I’d just been thinking about that very thing, assured him that polka dots really are making a big comeback right now, and that polka music will be next. I told him there have been editorials about the polka dot phenomenon, and that the renaissance of klezmer is the harbinger of polka’s resurgence. He seemed a little freaked out by my zeal, which reminded me how weird the whole conversation was in the first place since he was a total stranger, so I suddenly shut myself up and ended the conversation, and sat there staring at the empty screen praying for my friends to hurry back. It’s not fair to eccentrically start polka conversations with strangers, and then act like they’re the weird one. As he vacated his seat before the second show he thanked me for my “insights.”

The “evil” (human-sacrificing) twin sister in Cobra Woman taught us all about confidence and conviction. She spent much of the movie capping her directives with the announcement, “I have spoken!” I’d like to begin incorporating that into my life. Maybe I’ll have greater success when I call Payroll. “Listen, this woman hasn’t been paid in six weeks, and I submitted her last timesheet myself, so you’d better keep looking until you find it. I have spoken!” My favorite moments from the "Cobra Woman" show:

1.) When the Queen explained the social and moral decay of the Cobra People, saying “Fear has made them religious fanatics!” prompting the entire audience to erupt with applause.

2.) Once the bad guys were overthrown, the new High Priestess announces in her robotic accent: “Hatred and oppression have been ended here, forever.” This provoked widespread giggling, and in Dilip’s case, explosive cackling.

3.) To close our morality tale on the struggle between good and evil, and the importance of loyalty and love, the camera inexplicably closes its eye in the final shot on a close-up of a stowaway monkey surreptitiously mending a previously non-existent hole in the rear of the shorts Kado’s wearing as he leans over the back of the boat.

Cumulatively, I learned that heterosexuality and human sacrifice are abominations, friendship is important above all else, except for squads of gigantic fruit dancing in sync, which is the most important thing of all.