You can’t do it with a straight face

Thanksgiving day we had TerribleLynne as our guest, and for after-dinner entertainment she brought the video of A Mighty Wind, which I missed seeing when it was in the theaters.

OK, so I definitely Missed Out.  “Wind” nails the phenomenon of resurrecting long-gone groups from the Great Folk Scare of the early 1960s (as Martin Mull later said, “That shit almost caught on!“).  I immediately identified the “real” names of the acts in the movie:  The Folksmen are obviously The Kingston Trio, The Main Street Singers are either The New Christy Minstrels or The Serendipity Singers, take your pick, and Mitch & Mickey are pretty obviously Ian & Sylvia.  (I might have gone for Richard and Mimi Fariña, except Dick got killed way too early to qualify, and anyhow they were way more talented than that.)

And that might have been that, if L hadn’t called me to sit down in front of the television last night and watch the latest of T. J. Lubinsky’s reunion concerts for American Soundtrack, This Land Is Our Land:  The Folk-Rock Years II.  And swear to God, it was Mighty Wind laid out all over again, except these ginks were completely serious about it!  Lubinsky dug out Judy Collins to host, along with Denny Doherty and Michelle Phillips (all that’s left of The Mamas and the Papas), all the original Serendipity Singers, Tom Paxton, Erik Darling of The Rooftop Singers (apparently group member and Darling’s neighbor Bill Svanoe couldn’t be coaxed away from his current profession of screenwriter), Scott McKenzie, what’s left of Spanky and Our Gang, The Lovin’ Spoonful (minus centerpiece John Sebastian), Trini Lopez, one of The Sandpipers, Tommy Makem (who looked like he was fighting a Parkinsonian tremor in his right hand), The Hillside Singers, doing their version of the earworm Coca-Cola commercial, and a beam-in by The Seekers, who got stuck in Australia by the SARS quarantine.

Yeah . . . right.  While it was nice to hear some antique music (yes, it is too antique—although not quite as antique as I am), I couldn’t help flashing on parts of the movie again and again as I watched the parade of gone-by and resurrected acts.  Life was obviously imitating Art, completely oblivious that it was sending itself up in the process.  Gods, it was funny.  (Terri, I tried to phone you to tell you to turn on the TV and watch this silly thing, but you were out.)

And the funniest part of the whole thing?  One camera was panning across the crowd for reaction shots, and suddenly hit a tight cloes-up of someone who looked for all the world like “Mighty Wind” director Christopher Guest.  Talk about sending yourself up . . . .