Mamma Mia

With the upcoming release of the ABBA-inspired film Mamma Mia, everyone will soon be humming songs such as "Take a Chance on Me", "Waterloo" and "Dancing Queen." A few years ago, an adorable short video, The Last Video,was produced showing the four ABBA members as puppets, performing their hits and trying to get a record deal from a slimy record producer played by Rik Mayall. My husband assures me that most of the dialog spoken in the video comes from ABBA lyrics. It's a very cute video and even features a cameo appearance by Cher.

Speaking of Rik Mayall, I recently had the pleasure experience of reading his "autobiography", Bigger than Hitler-Better than Christ. It might be OK to read a few pages, put it down for several months, read a few more pages, etc. Reading it straight through quickly gets repetitive. If you are a Rik Mayall fan (as I most assuredly am), you will recognize his writing/speaking style. A typical passage:

". . . you know how sometimes you've got to go out and you've got to put on a raincoat in case it's raining. Well, it might have been raining but it wasn't raining on the place where I came out of my front door because that was the place where it wasn't raining. If you went down the street, it might have been raining but the thing is, I wasn't there. I was back where my house is. So the whole thing about the raincoat is that it's not important because -- you know everything that I've just said, right, well forget that because it's not important either, okay?"

And so on. Which goes to show that you can use a lot of words and say absolutely nothing (wonder if he was paid by the word?). I still love Rik, though, for the People's Poet, if nothing else!