Your friend Behr (me) has been watching a lot of Lifetime channel movies lately. I find it hardens up the old bow something fierce. Anyway, recently I saw a movie called Fearful of Condiments: The Jeremy Richards Story and I wanted to talk about it with friends and neighbors. Unfortunately, they are all sleeping so I'll talk to you (noder or visitor).
When I won the Nobel Prize for my 1977 painting, Man on Porch Drinking Miller Beer it was not because I tried to win the Nobel Prize with that painting. I tried to paint the best painting that I could and ended up winning the Nobel Prize and selling the painting for $65M dollars US currency. Yes, I am THAT good. Do NOT doubt it. I am a writer and a painter and a guy who used to beat on seven-year-olds just because he could get away with it at the time. I am a businessman. We are a dying breed.
The director of this movie was credited just as "Mr. Jacobson" which is something I've never seen before in a movie. This was my first clue that I was going on a mystical journey. I was going down the river.
Watching a movie like this, you find yourself wondering if there really is any point in living. If something like this can be made, why can't you sell your scrotal scrapings on e-Bay (a company) for top dollar? It isn't right. I mean, I will go down there with several files and a wire brush and I will scrape and pull at my scrotum to free up the scrapings and fill an entire Ziploc Freezer Bag (tm) with those scrapings and still I can't figure out what the point in continuing to live is.
Of course, I have other business interests. I just wish that one would have paid off. Instead, I sunk sixteen thousand dollars into the project and could find no buyers. The economy is to blame. Obambo.
The movie opens with the main character, Jeremy Richards, out having coffee with a friend. Now, this is based on the real life Jeremy Richards of Alexandria, Virginia who was so terrified of condiments that he would regular soil himself while sitting at a restaurant table whenever the wait staff would put condiments on the table. Sad. He tried to warn them, but instead, down the pants leg it flows. Doubly sad.
So, we are now "emotionally invested" (Internet kiddie term) in this man's fate. Will he succumb or fight? Normally, we couldn't care less but this is Lifetime and the music gets us going along with the dramatic interplay between the characters which is celebrated in the arts REGULARLY. We want to see if he pulls his shit together because his friend Mary seems to like him quite a little bit. Except she can't stand how he freaks out when she puts ketchup on her French fries. So, if he is going to score with this nerdy, average librarian girl he needs to get some bearings.
This is where we become so much more emotionally invested in the story and these characters (and stories and characters are KEY in writing). We keep watching, making ourselves a snack as we snuggle up on the couch with our bowl and our drink and our blankey.
I love those times.
So, Mary gives him an ultimatum and Jeremy fails and ends up turning to heroin to cope. And then at Christmas (oddly enough), Mary shows up again and she has some sauce packets from Taco Bell and he doesn't react. He's so numb from the heroin that he is able to look past the sauce packets and embrace Mary and take her to a Best Western motel and do her.
This movie is Five Stars on the Behr rating system. Watch it twice to make sure you catch all the antics of secondary character "Bernadette."