Most people have favorite things they like to quote. Maybe it's from a movie. Or a television show. Or a book.
Are you like most people? Because in this respect, I am.
I've had pretty steady access to media throughout my life. TV, music, movies—stuff that makes up pop culture, essentially. And there have been so many memorable scenes, or lines, or catch phrases that have stuck with me, filling my brain so that when and where they are needed, they can quickly be retrieved and applied correctly to any given situation.
Take for example the clip above, from one of my favorite old movies, Airplane.
Yesterday, Dan had a long, busy day at work planned, so I decided to send him a text early in the day that said this:
He knew it was Leslie Nielson, but he kept guessing, "Police Squad?" Throughout the rest of the day, whenever he would text me, I'd simply reply with: "Good luck. We're all counting on you."
SIDE NOTE: Yesterday around mid morning, I looked out into the backyard to see two St. Paul police officers, weapons drawn and police dog at the ready, on my deck and in my garage. Turns out they were looking for 'a guy.' This was how it went down via text to Dan, keeping my quote theme in mind:
Of course this got me thinking of my favorite things to quote. Two nights ago, we were flipping channels and landed on Pulp Fiction. Now this is a movie you either loved or hated or didn't see, but we're huge fans, so we started watching. I can't quote a lot of it here on this PG-rated blog, but we decided last night we'd try to work more of Pulp Fiction into our Dan–Cathy quote habits. You okay? Nah, man… I'm pretty f-in far from okay.
One movie I will quote here is probably my most oft quoted movie of all time, Silence of the Lambs.
I know what you're thinking: Cathy, you're sick. But seriously, aside from the fact that I believe this movie to be a veritable master class for writing, directing and acting, it is also one of the richest founts of quotable material in the celluloid realm.
But not just for the great (albeit disturbing) scenes like this (which you will have to watch on YouTube, as embedding has been disabled):
I can do this scene from memory. Macabre? Perhaps. But you know what is totally awesome? When you can drop parts of this into casual conversation. Or when you can recite it via the Talking Tom Cat.
In this house, we go well beyond the 'fava beans and a nice chianti.' You get what I'm saying?
My friend and frequent contributor to The Pioneer Woman's Entertainment blog, Mark Spearman, shares my love of this movie and it's exceptionally high quotable quotient. But not just SOTL, we also love to quote Contact, Aliens, and only recently have begun to mine the sorely overlooked material from Poltergeist.
Our Facebook exchanges often will take whatever is going on in the world or our lives and will be made over to fit into borrowed dialogue from any of these movies.
Take the following scene from Silence of the Lambs—and I will not share a clip because it's a bit racy—but there's a scene when Lecter says to Clarice, "Apparently Jack Crawford likes you, and you like him too…true, he is much older than you…" and then he proceeds to get completely inappropriate. Does this ring a bell?
Mark will lift such dialog directly, clean it up and drop it right onto my Facebook page, like this:
And that just makes my day.
Go ahead, make my day!
What about you? What do you and your family quote? Have you ever thought about documenting those phrases and words you pull from the mass media that surrounds you?
Surely that's a very do-able idea.
Yes, Cathy. It is. And please, stop calling me Shirley.
