Post Card to Thompson June 22, 2019: Burt and Loni formally dressed
for a red-carpet affair

    Every time I see a Reynolds movie I am
transported back to the graveyard shift in the Tavern.
On my break, at the door, sipping a pint of Bass Ale
or slamming the pint, depending on how the night,
before 2 AM had been. Amazing to me now how
many of those breaks ended up in bloodshed.
    Out of staters can’t get their heads around
bars staying open to 4 AM as they can in NY.
You don’t need a stat sheet, crime cluster pattern
spread sheet, to know that most of the violence in
bars happen between 2 and 4 A.M. St Patrick’s Day
and New Year’s Eve don’t count.
    After the game of the season is over, the only
choice for early morning viewing involves cable movie
channels where Burt was, and probably, still is king....
The only one of his movies I have actually, voluntarily
seen, is Deliverance. There are nights I could have used
his bow technique against LA (lower Albany) low life.
(The New York versions not the California Okies.) I’m not
vindictive, but more than one scumbag I can think of would
look better with an arrow through his neck. And not just
the guy who was arrested for murder the week after
I last served him in the tavern. He got a lifetime to think
about his misdeeds. Maybe that is worse than a pointed jugular
stick with feathers.
     Alternatives to Reynolds movies, almost equally
as bad, were frequent features. Early Don Johnson movies,
A Boy and His Dog, comes to mind, or Claudia Jennings
full frontal feature with bank robberies, The Great Texas
Dynamite Chase...Amazing to me now how many Reynolds
flicks I’ve, more or less, seen. I’d watch Semi-Tough again
but the rest of them, not so much. Don’t get me started on
The Longest Yard ....
     As for Loni, well, I’m not sure I would want to
see a full frontal of her give how much silicone she was
shot up with. What was she actually in, anyway?
My dreams of those endless nights seem like a perfect
version of hell. The further down the rungs you go, the more
Burt Reynolds movies there are. Who knew hell was a bar,
with wall-to-wall TVs in it? If you’d been stuck inside that
same bar with nine, full screen, never blinking TV’s, on 9-11
for nine hours you’d know exactly what I mean.