A brief observation on body language
Just look at that body language. Like an unfortunate couple that has been married two decades too long. Three rows back and three seats over, Gene Siskel has positioned himself far enough away from Roger Ebert that any communication between the two would require something just short of a shout. Or a sneer.
He needs his fucking space.
It’s why bands break up, why marriages end, why siblings stop speaking to each other, why disgruntled employees steal a faulty printer from the office, take it to a field thirty miles from town, and proceed to trounce it to death. Ok, that’s a scene from Office Space, but you know it was based in reality. Someone really did that.
It’s why “It’s five o’clock somewhere” backslid into the Martini Lunch. It’s why Valium was invented. It’s why yoga exists. It’s why moms of preschoolers fill their coffee tumblers with chardonnay at 9:00 in the morning and converge in the school parking lot after walking their exuberant tots to school, delaying the return to the ennui of domesticity.
It’s why Cross Fit is so popular, why Cross Fitters can’t wait for their gyms to post the daily workout routine first thing in the morning, iPhones in hand and ready to log on to the site the second the new routine goes live, instead of having a nice civilized chat over breakfast with a cinnamon soy latte and their Significant Other.
It’s why a round of golf takes at least four hours to play and requires one to be away from home for a good six hours, taking travel time and locker room banter into consideration.
It’s why speaker volumes turn up to 11; it’s why boom-boxes were invented, and those big clunky headphones that look like they should belong to an air traffic controller with a four-foot cord, long enough so that you don’t have to actually hold on to that boom box while you play your jam, but close enough that it is clear to everyone that the beats belong to you and this is what you’re doing right now. It’s why those big clunky headphones morphed into the more svelte headsets inspired by 1950’s telephone operators, which morphed into the ear buds they used to hand out as a matter of course when you boarded an airplane, which morphed into cordless ear buds that stay in your ears through some sort of engineering magic that still doesn’t quite work for everyone. Sometimes those cordless ear buds do fall out, engineers. There’s some tweaking required there.
It’s why the term Shut the Fuck Up was invented.
I can’t imagine Gene Siskel shouting at his partner to Shut the Fuck Up. But he probably did. It’s probably on the blooper reel.