Stir-Crazy Showcase

            Getting stir-crazy in your apartments from self-isolation? 

            The NY Times theater critic suggested reading aloud plays at home if you are a theater buff. But if you are a movie lover like me, why not re-enact your favorite scenes from movies?

            Rip up your sheets to use as costumes. Break up the furniture to create sets. Put up blankets as backdrops, or just draw on your walls with magic markers. Who cares? You’re never going to get out of your apartment alive anyway. And good luck to the landlord imagining getting another month’s rent. 

            So where to begin?

            Let’s start off easy. How about Jimmy Stewart’s impassioned filibuster on the floor of the Senate in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. Just pull the kitchen table out into the middle of the room. Cover it with papers and a glass of water to use as props. Get dressed in a rumpled suit and keep your tie slightly loosened. Muss up your hair and look frazzled. (That should be easy if you’ve been binging on CNN). Now stand at the table, hunched over, exhausted and angry and let loose with that amazing diatribe from the movie, “Get up there with that lady who’s on top of the Capital dome! That lady that stands for liberty! Take a minute to look through her eyes, if you really want to see something! You’ll see the whole parade of what man carved out for himself after centuries of fighting! And fighting for something better than jungle law- so he can stand on his own two feet, free and decent like he was created! No matter what his race, color or creed!” If you can memorize the nearly three-minute speech, more power to you. Or, you could just imagine yelling at today’s congress all afternoon just to let off steam.

            Has the mail been delivered? Maybe it’s time to go down the stairs to pick it up re-enacting Gloria Swanson’s finale in Billy Wilder’s corrosive look at Hollywood- Sunset Boulevard. Put on a dressing gown, or a robe, and dramatically head down the stairs to the mailboxes, preening like crazy and arching your back, dramatically acting for an imaginary camera as you go, crazily saying “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. Demille,” to any startled tenants you run into on the way down.  

            Why not try to imagine you are coach Gene Hackman in the movie Hossiers. It’s his rousing speech to his team, “If you put your effort and concentration into playing to your potential. To be the best that you can be, I don’t care what the scoreboard says at the end of the game. In my book we’re gonna be winners.“ But why stop there? Just imagine as the basketball team is filing out onto the court, whispering to one of them, “I fucked your mother. And your father too.”

            You can imagine you are President Bill Pullman in Independence Day, motivating the US fighter pilots against the attack by aliens. You can just change “aliens” to “Covid-19” if it makes you feel any better, and then let rip: “We’re fighting for our right to live, to exist and should we win the day, the fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day when the world declared in one voice, ‘We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on, we’re going to survive.’ Today we celebrate Independence Day!” Pay no attention to the people in the next apartment furiously banging on your wall. 

            Feeling a bit down today? Maybe it’s time to recreate the finale of I Want To Live with Susan Hayward, who played real-life former prostitute Barbara Graham, questionably accused of murder, who was sent to die in the gas chamber.  You can create a sweet little gas chamber in the kitchen with blankets and pillows, and then don a sleep mask and take that last walk from your cell (the living room) to the kitchen. Try to imagine guards guiding you to the chamber and then saying “Step up,” as you enter the pod. Place a chair with plenty of belts in the middle and strap yourself in.  Imagine one of the guards whispering, “When you hear the pellets drop, count to 10- it’s easier that way.” Just so you can snap back, “How do you know?” Then you can do your own big death scene, your head snapping forward on your chest as you die.” For added realism, why not open the gas jets in your oven during your big finale? 

            Since you are practically a prisoner anyway, why not pretend you are serial killer Hannibal Lector in The Silence Of The Lambs. If you have a basic jumpsuit even sweeter. Just stand there pretending you are in a cell and smacking you lips, feeling evil. You can recreate all those delicious conversations with special agent Clarisse Starling (Jody Foster) like, “You’re using Evian skin cream.” Then you can sniff the air. “You know what you look like to me with your good bag and your cheap shoes- you look like a rube.“ And always finish with, “A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.” If you’ve stockpiled canned goods why not eat some of those beans right out of the can with a spoon? And true, it may be 11am, but you might as well pour yourself a glass of wine. It’s going to be another long one.

            How about the shower murder sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho? Well you’re going to have to fashion a dowdy dress out of those sheets. And what about a wig? Will that bottom of the old-fashioned mop work? Maybe you can cobble together a headpiece out of all the steel wool you bought to plug in the mice holes in the apartment. And then get yourself the biggest knife in the utensil drawer. Okay, now if you’re lucky to have the Bernard Herrmann soundtrack album (like I do) you can blast it as you stealthily creep to the bathroom and then tear open the shower curtain plunging the blade repeatedly into the void, imagining all those you could be hacking right now. An old boyfriend? A mean elementary school teacher? A particularly hateful parent? Or that niece with the smug smile that used to ruin family gatherings. Maybe that jerk on the fourth floor of your apartment building who has been consistently stealing all the tenants’ packages. 

            You can even remake movies with alternative endings. Pretend you are one of the Von Trapp children at the end of The Sound Of Music, escaping over the mountain. Suddenly there can be a hail of bullets from Nazi soldiers and you can fall and writhe around on the living room rug, flailing your arms and legs as each bullet pierces your little songbird flesh. Squirt ketchup as the blood shoots from your riddled corpse. Or else imagine you are all escaping, when a giant avalanche suddenly overtakes you, burying all your brothers and sisters, even your dad and that silver-tongued governess, under tons of crushing snow. Pretend gasping for air. Maybe even a choking refrain of “Doe, a deer, a female deer..”

            There’s no end to the fun you can have at home. That is, until the toilet paper runs out.