I'm endowed with some impressive super powers. I have sexy hand model hands. I'm good with date recollection. (e.g. R.E.M.'s Automatic For The People was released on October 6, 1992.) And I can harmonize the crap out of the last line of the Happy Birthday song. But these abilities pale in comparison to that one fleeting instance when I possessed psychic abilities.
It was 1997 Toronto. Summertime. I was fast asleep, having a weird dream. And in this dream, I was a bit player in the sequel to the 1980 Dan Aykroyd / John Belushi comedy, The Blues Brothers. Kind of a non-sequitur, given A) I'd never seen the film (although I've heard great things), and B) I had no idea a sequel was in the works.
Before the dream could reach its conclusion, I was awakened by a phone call. A buddy of mine had just won a radio contest. The prize: he and three friends would be extras in the new Blues Brothers sequel being filmed just north of the city.
Whoa.
Here's the thing: anyone with a vague grasp of the film industry knows this is a crappy prize. Extra work is long and boring. (Three of the worst days of my life were spent on the set of the 1994 comedy PCU.) And although it's a paid gig, these financial benefits don't trickle down to contest winners. As such, I'd normally have taken a hard pass on my friend's offer. But THE DREAM! Clearly the universe wanted me on this movie. I decided I had no choice to go and figure out why.
The shoot was that very night, at a giant park in Barrie, Ontario. A big performance scene where the Blues Brothers band would rock out onstage to a jaunty ditty. Knowing things could go long, director John Landis was convincing extras to stay by raffling off prizes every half hour. You know, Blues Brothers swag, chotskies, and whatnot. And those willing to stick around for the entire shoot could win the piece de resistance: an all-expenses-paid trip to Florida.
"That must be why I'm here," I thought to myself. I really needed a vacation, and I've got me some kin down in the Sunshine State. Clearly I was supposed to win this raffle and pay them a visit. "Easy peasy," I figured. "I'll just wait things out."
Peasy? Perhaps. Easy? Not so much. Because fate opted to throw some obstacles in my path. First off, things didn't just go long. They went impossibly long. And the temperature took one heck of an unexpected dip. So five or six hours in, I was more chilled and sour than a $4 bottle of Pinot Grigio.
And then came the wallop. Turns out the scene in question required a gaggle of skeletal horsemen to appear from the dark, stormy sky. Because that's what happens in movies about blues bands, dammit. Although the clouds and skeletons would be added in post via CGI, Landis wanted practical storm effects. And so his crew wheeled the rain machine: a towering steampunk-style contraption that resembled the world's largest shower head.
The couple hundred extras who remained -- myself being one of them -- were then hit with 20 minutes of freezing cold torrential rain. Touché, Mr. Landis. Touché. (Here's the scene, by the way. It's 28 percent more frigid than you were imagining.)
Drenched, freezing, and plenty irritable, I had completed my final challenge. The only thing left to do was win the Florida trip my known psychic abilities had promised.
Mr. Landis took to the stage, stepped up to the microphone, and asked the crowd to pull out their very un-dry raffle tickets. We obliged, anxiety and anticipation merging with the unseasonably cold air.
Landis called out the number. Silence. Then I excitedly shouted out, "That's me!"
Scratch that. I didn't yell those words. The dude standing right next to me did. Literally right freaking next to me. He ran up to Landis, collected his prize, and then (presumably) had sex with a dozen supermodels backstage. As for me? I did my best to dry off (courtesy of the 10"x10" facecloths the crew provided), shivered my way home, and went to bed.
The moral of this story? I have no idea. Sure, my dream was most decidedly psychic. But since nothing good came from following its instructions, what was the point? I didn't win the raffle, so there was no reward. And outside of "Cold showers suck," there was no life lesson to take away. To quote a classic episode of The Simpsons, "Maybe it's just a bunch of stuff that happened."
Mr. Landis, if this article somehow gets passed your way, I'm still hoping for something cool to come from this. Nearly 20 years later, my psychic tale deserves a badass ending, no?