Quit "farting around"! Or we'll be late. . . . . .

Scene Changes

EXT. The Self-Help Center, 1991, Day

This building is a wooden, white-frame house that practically stands alone in a sea of concrete, next to a construction company. A creek runs down into a wooded area with a tangle of leaves, and the adjacent road is peaceful and occupied-- full of grass and a railroad trestle.

Wow! Where'd you hear about that? BATMAN!

SCENE CHANGES

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Clips of Tim Burton's sleek, black, hip, 1989 classic with "The Batmobile" doing all sorts of amazing tricks. Big money, big cultural phenomenon, big commercial tie-in's and searchlights sweeping the skies with great promotional fanfare.

SCENE CHANGES

EXT. McDonald's Parking Lot, 1991, Day

Two overweight guys in drooping spandex lean next to an old beat-to-shit 1970's "junk car" with a "bat logo" painted on the side. This is "Batman" & "Robin" as understood in the corny old t.v. show sense, genuine enough for the eight preschoolers or so who showed up as they hand out poorly-Xeroxed autographs. The parents-- mostly single mothers with long, frizzy hair-- laugh and "take it in stride" as the kids play make-believe that they're Batman at the feet of these imposters. THE ADAMS BOYS look around with pinched embarrassment with a soft drink in their hands, trying to be good sports, but understanding that wherever the "buzz" and "excitement" were, it was not to be found out here in this parking lot with "The Barney Crowd".

SCENE CHANGES

INT. Jack in The Box, 1991, Night

A frowzy, poor-looking family eats dinner on a cold, winter's night. They sit there rustling their hamburger wrappers in cheap, puffy coats from yard-sales and "Good Will". Cherubic decorations brought out of storage are taped up on the frosted windows, adding to the tacky cheer.

A marginal, buck-toothed cashier gives them a complimentary bag of small fries, the result of an order mix-up, which they devour at the table like obese rats. "After-all, it is Christmas", she figures to herself with a guffaw.

But in the haze we sat in, a drifting Mississippi raft made out of mud, pus, and slime that would split apart the second it seriously hit a rock, it always seemed better to "keep your fingers crossed" for what time would eventually "kick our way". . . . . and not to "rock the boat".

SCENE CHANGES

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Photograph of MINDY, or at least a damn fine representation of her, that captures this cool, sleek, mellow, laid-back woman who has a fundamentally even grip on how society works.

SONG PLAYS: Something from "Tangerine Dream" from the "Three O' Clock High" Soundtrack-- a slow instrumental that suggests tingling glamour and potential somewhere off in the night with its stinging guitars and insistent synthesized tapping, almost a mystical "Eastern" balance you would see in kung-fu movies suggesting transcendence.

"But for motivation's sake, there was Mindy-- one of my cheese-flake mother's meditation partners. Her voice was gentle, with a brilliant mind-- a country/western woman from Utah who saw the world squarely. Possibilities of possibilities, that you could be anything you wanted to be if you only worked hard enough. The legend of Arnold Schwarzenegger for instance, who came here to America with nothing but his gym bag and free will and became "Mr. Universe", if not the #1 action star in the movies. . . . .

SCENE CHANGES AS NARRATION READS ON

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MUSIC CONTINUES

SCENE CHANGES

EXT. Central West End Video Store, 1991, Night

MINDY, MOTHER, and THE YOUNG ADAMS BOYS go tramping to the video store which is located in a piece of the calm, revitalized city where there is the tingle of excitement, of action, of possibility. Green trees, orange squiggly neon signs, the smell of Chinese food in those neat little containers with the red, Oriental artwork.

MUSIC CONTINUES

SCENE CHANGES

INT. Mindy's Living Room, 1991, Night

This was 1991. America has decisively won the first Gulf War and was standing tall. In this little pocket of life, we felt like a steel girder, the collective of us all over the country riveted together and rising in the sky to form a proud super-structure-- an armed-to-the-teeth fortress of 20,000+ nuclear warheads pointing across the Atlantic at the Soviet Union as if poking a finger in their adversary's chest to say, "YOU. . . . . we're not like you, we stand in opposition to you, and soon with the imminent close of "The Cold War" we shall stand triumphant as a McDonald's opens in the streets of your dark, snowy capital", Meanwhile, we urchins scurried around the base of America and "had our fun". The world seemed rather uncomplicated, but you knew someday you would rise up in courage. Courage you see. The courage to stare down life like a man!

Here a bizarre, "feel-good" movie about death that gave you the willies by sloshing its hand in the dark waters of the cauldron and showing you that there cannot be light without darkness. And in this movie was a teenaged Winona Ryder, dressed up like a goth-witch. . . . . the most uncannily beautiful, luminescent creature I had ever seen in my entire life-- then or since. I looked over at Mindy, I looked over at Winona, I looked over at my own candy-assed Jewish mother who overindulged me like a young Donald Trump-- and that was the troika right there in that living room, as certain as the three beautiful fates.

Something opened up for me in the universe where all the forces of cosmic possibility fried through my stately, 9 year-old consciousness and I knew this was a more important moment than saving an 8-bit, pixilated princess in "Super Mario Bros." This was quite real, and zapping through me with more power than the arcade game, "Golden-Axe" where you went around chopping up townsfolk in some duped, 6th generation "Robert E. Howard" pulp fantasy.

I was the hero in this novel. . . . . but life happens while you're making other plans and you fall to the easy temptation of milk and Oreo cookies and endless rounds of "Super Mario 2" whose warped Middle Eastern motif channeled through Japanese programmers then fed back to American audiences suggested the opium dreams of a caterpillar burrowing through the sand in search of shit to suck on. I ask you, audience-- "WHO REALLY WON WORLD WAR II?" Case closed.

That evening, in coming days and weeks, I would find myself wondering whatever happened to "that girl", what she was up to, if she was doing well and thriving, all while being completely oblivious to what was happening in the world of tabloids and Hollywood glamour. She and a young, grim-faced alternative kid named Johnny Depp were "the king and queen of young Hollywood" and "all the rage" and the fires of cult adulation were blazing up into the night beyond the red velvet ropes of fame.

How could I "not know"? Kids can get lost in their own bubble of video games and "Archie" comic books, not knowing much else than what was right in front of them. In fact, the month I watched "Beetlejuice" Winona was on the cover of "Rolling Stone" magazine on every newsstand across America. And I didn't know?

"The Bubble" sets up its own liabilities, and is perhaps why this vague, hokey President-- who reminded me of a clueless, dorky grandfather-- got booted from office and right on his patrician pratt by a younger, hipper, more astute generation that brought you "The Simpsons". Was it the upward forces of evolution, or just the downward drag of social-Darwinism?