Monday, July 07, 2008

Mountaintop Vision

At the conference, Bill Nevin often plays a Bollywood movie. He's a big fan of these mostly musical films from India, and quite knowledgeable about them.

Meanwhile, a lot of attendees wanted updates on the Atlas Shrugged movie. Angelina Jolie is lined up to play Dagny, but the deal hasn't quite come together yet. Now there are concerns about an actors' strike.

With that set-up, here is the last of my humorous banquet verses.

I had a vision late last night
about the Atlas movie.
Dagny danced – a lovely sight
to music wild and groovy.
At first I thought, “Now this is strange.
Why is Dagny singing
In this high soprano range
that sets my ears a-ringing?”

But then it slowly dawned on me:
I couldn't understand
the words she sang so beautifully.
Had this stuff come from Rand?
She sang upon a mountaintop
cool and clear and windy.
Then I hollered: “Hold on, stop!
Dagny's singing Hindi!”

"You know this really can't be right
I shouted up to heaven.
This is a bootleg – played tonight
probably by Bill Nevin."
I got the movie stopped, of course.
The philosophy may be open,
but Atlas isn't open source
so we must go on hopin' --

Hopin' someday Hollywood
will make this gosh darn flick.
And though I trust it will be good,
I fear it it won't be quick.
Great things take time. Wait patiently.
And Dagny, as she oughter
will be played most wonderfully
by Angelina's daughter.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

John, that was hilarious. Sorry I wasn't still around to hear it "live," but I'm glad you've immortalized it here.

--Robert Bidinotto

John Enright said...

Thank you, Robert. During my speech I went through a section on new "reach out" assignments for different people. Mostly they were silly things I just made up. But when I got to you I said "Robert Bidinotto is going to reach out to regular people. It's a good idea. But it's not funny. Robert, I need something funnier!" That got a laugh, paradoxically enough.