Xanadu

Many of you who know me know that I have had what some have called an unholy obsession with the movie Xanadu. I have had a major breakthrough. I was watching High School Musical last night with my family. Yes I love it and make no apologies. In fact I love HSM 1, 2, & 3. Yeah so, yeah so, I call it HSM. Anyway, I was watching HSM and we started talking about Kenny Ortega and I commented about how young or old he was. Lindsay said he was sixty or at least in his late fifties. I almost swallowed my tongue. I thought for sure he was in his early forties. I bet her a$1,000,000.00 and went to the Internet. I promise this all has something to do with Xanadu. Needless to say I owe Lindsay alot of money. He is 59 years old. I was shocked. But I also saw that he was in the movie Xanadu. Holy crap, I thought to myself, I have that movie upstairs. Yes I own my very own copy. I might be the only person, or parent of a person not involved in the movie that has a copy at home. I am not speaking of the soundtrack. The soundtrack is great. ELO is great, how could the soundtrack not be fantastic. Well it is, check it out. So I ran up the stairs found my copy, worn and battered as it was and put it in. Austin at this time was screaming that he hated this movie and that is was boring. I told him that the guy who did HSM is in it. I thought this would give me time see the part that I wanted. Wrong, I was then informed that neither Troy Bolten nor Gabriella Montez was in this movie. When do they get so smart? Alas, I started to watch the movie and found much to my dismay that everything I had been told from everyone was true. It is a really bad movie. Almost unwatchable. So I skipped to the dancing parts to see if I could see the Kenny Ortega flavor. I really could not tell, it is all just dancing to me. Needless to say that it was a sad night in the Jones family last night, for part of me died. My fond memory of driving to Video Corral in Mesa Arizona with my brothers and our babysitter in 1983 to get a movie that she called "awesome" is dead. The movie was really not "awesome" unless you add a "ly" to that "awesome" followed by a bad.
I did learn two things last night, however. One, Kenny Ortega also did the dance scene from Ferris Bueller. I did not know that and that is a much better movie. Two, if you look very closely during the last dance scene entitled Xanadu you will find Ozone, aka Shabba-Do. I almost pulled out my limited edition copy of "Breakin'", almost. I knew what I would have found if I were to watch, probably a really bad eighties movie. Not again father time, not again.