Trivial Pursuits
it should be no surprise that my mind went from eye patch to pirates to “Pirates of the Caribbean” to Orlando Bloom and right back to Orlando.
Orlando Bloom stars as Will Turner in the Pirates of the Caribbean films, which loosely reference the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at DisneyWorld in Orlando, Fla. My brother-in-law's middle name is Orlando.

The disaster parody “Airplane!” is what drew my teammates Chris, Brian and I together as pop culture comrades, and our trip to the audition would also prove to be a mockery of the airline industry.
I probably saw Airplane! (1980) 150 times when it was on pay cable as a kid and it is one of the primary reasons I spend a lot of time parodying serious situations and making lame puns that will have you reaching for your snare drum and cymbal.

A sharp-shooting security guard, suspecting chemical weaponry, shot the bottle out of my hand, simultaneously hitting me in my Tell-Tale-Heart-haunted eye, leaving me dead on the floor with my shoes floating dramatically by in a sturdy plastic tray on the conveyor belt.
What?! A literary reference not from a B-movie? In Bill's writing? If you don't know about Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart," get thee to a nunnery! Oh, wait, that's a reference to Shakespeare, another of my favorite classic authors. I mean, get thee to a book store! Seriously, before there was CSI, there was gruesome, suspenseful Edgar Allan Poe, and though the old man's eye in the story isn't exactly pink, it's a key feature.

I arrived in Charleston, S.C., and deplaned (De plane! De plane! Sorry, pop culture again)
For my younger readers, the television show Fantasy Island famously featured actor Herve Villechaize looking skyward and heralding the arrival of guests by yelling "The plane! The plane!" in his thick accent. He was never seen looking skyward and yelling "Khan!" as far as I can recall.

I couldn’t locate the Shrink-wrapped Stegosaurus model, so I explained that it was huge and black, with a lot of broken zippers, like the jacket “Weird Al” Yankovic wore in his “Fat” video.
A parody of Michael Jackson's "Bad," featuring Al in one of the first memorable uses of a fat suit, complete with unnecessary zips and pockets everywhere.

While Brian went solo, Chris and I went Solo and Chewbacca, with Chris weaving at breakneck speed through traffic like Han through an asteroid field, and his giant, unshaven co-pilot yelping like a car-sick Wookiee from the passenger seat. Despite our exhaustion, we made it to the hotel. We hadn’t yet met up with Game Show Jedi Brian, but we were already making a pretty good team, which would come in handy later.
Um, yeah, Star Wars. I'm not the type to wear a Tusken Raider outfit to a film premiere, but I am nerd enough to know there are two E's in "wookiee."

A few beers, steaks and trivia questions about Hugh Laurie later,
Hugh Laurie is the star of House, and we had a weird feeling they would ask how his character got the limp. Turns out it's from a disease he has and he is not Keiser Soze after all.

we retired to the hotel, Chris cracking the lid to his laptop and me thinking of TLC’s Lisa Lopes while trying to crack the lid of my left eye.
Dead at 31 years of age, Lisa "Left-Eye" Lopes was the "L" in hip-hop girl group TLC. For more spooky Left-Eye trivia, note that the letters of the word arson are contained within the name "Andre Rison."

I finally decided that since the eye was making me self-conscious, I would start tomorrow’s audition by telling the interviewers that Uma Thurman had attacked me in a trailer and pulled the eye out, but that I was lucky enough to stuff it back into the socket before she stepped on it.
This particularly disgusting reference is to Kill Bill, Part 2, and I assure you it's much nastier on film. Everybody in the theatre, all together now: "Ewwwww!"

but we weren’t going to learn anything about, say, the Bee Gees from our waitress.
This has nothing to do with the waitress or The Waitresses ("I Know What Boys Like") and is simply a reference to the B-rothers G-ibb. Scary side note: Brian can name a dozen of their songs.

To be safe, I checked the front desk again first. When the clerk ducked into a back room and emerged with my bag, it felt like Christmas morning.
"Christ" is a popular protagonist made famous by an early New York Times List Best-Seller known as "The Bible." Maybe I'm annotating a little too much...see ya next month. But not before I note that my reference to the clerk above led me to think about Kevin Smith, who not only wrote and directed the cult classic Clerks, but also Dogma, which features the "Buddy Christ" icon shown above. While putting together this web page, I was a little frightened by the possibility that Barry Gibb and Christ are the same person.

Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself (and possibly botulism)
...Chris came up with something perfect: “Gone in Six Seconds.” Not only was it a play on pop culture, which had brought us here in the first place, but it was also totally appropriate for the task at hand.
Gone in 60 Seconds is a film about car thieves starring Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie. It also features a character called the The Sphinx, played by Vinnie Jones, a terrifying character actor that many Americans may also recognize from X-Men 3 or Snatch. Jones was also an accomplished professional English footballer before taking up acting, and perhaps he was chosen for the latter film for the legendary onfield moment in which he snatched up an opponent's balls and gripped tightly. No, Jones wasn't the goalie.

Brian and his opponents appeared on a three-story-high platform in what can only be described as Red Jumpsuit Apparatus (no offense to the current band of the same name).
Red Jumpsuit Apparatus' song "Face Down" is getting some heavy air time right now. Here's Brian getting some Face Down air time of his own.