Your 'Can't Miss' Motion Picture for 2005

If I am going to Make My Pile, which I must if I am to be reincarnated as Smokey the Russian Blue Cat, I expect I will have to go into the motion picture business.

I did not say "movie." "Movie" is short for "moving pictures." "Moving pictures" is what you do when you move. You also move desks and pianos and other ungainly objects so that you achieve a permanently bad back. Which is what you get for not hiring Mayflower to move your damn pictures.

"The Mayflower Compact" would be a good film but it's probably been done by the DAR or the Temperance Union. So my motion picture is going to be about British royalty. I know absolutely nothing about British royalty, which makes writing the script a piece of cake. People really dig science fiction; why wouldn't they fall all over themselves getting to my history fiction?

For this film, I think we will open with The Beatles singing "Hen-e-ry the Eighth I Am, I Am (I got married to the widow next door, etc.)." This would be voiceover to some beheadings, Mary Queen of Scots and Anne Boleyn come to mind. I am undecided. I guess it will depend upon what era of baskets for chopped heads that we can find in the antique shops.

Do you know why the United Nations delegates sit in a circle? So nobody can be "at the head of the table." They got this idea of equality from King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I doubt Arthur was paid any royalties for this idea. (His copywilburwright probably has expired, anyway.) So maybe we will have a segment on different-shaped tables Arthur considered -- rectangles, trapezoids, tetrahedrons, etc. -- before settling on round. This will give film-goers a chance to go get popcorn.

Fade to black, then slow dissolve to Wallis Simpson. She's the American lady that King Edward VIII needed to play footsie with. So he abdicates (we will give the people who attend my motion picture a handbook which explains British phrases, like "abdicate," "spot on," and "jolly good." I will hire my buddy Shane, an Englisher who is presently unemployed so it won't cost me much.)

We will probably have an Alfred Hitchcock moment, in which we catch Prince Charles nude in the shower in the Bates Motel. I am told that even if our focus goes below the belly button we still will retain our PG rating.

Our Big Scene will be in the Tower of London. It is a requirement of British royalty that there always be six ravens in the Tower (currently there are eight). These ravens are often fed a rabbit carcass, but in my film we will have them feasting on some plain old tea-and-crumpets type, like Monty Python, who will shrug off The Birds, turn his face to the audience and ask, "Is British royalty relevant?"

I hope it is not too late for the motion picture houses to insure against the avalanche caused by 500 people yelling "No way!!"

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My favorite word today is inscrutable. Adj., imponderable. Def.: The first six chapters of a book on your bedside table which has such an impenetrable plot you can't bring yourself to continue.