Our Town – February 13, 2014

The Soupster can’t escape Sitka in the movies.

“Whaddaya wanna watch?” Dorothy O’Dean asked the Soupster.

“Something fantastic, Dottie” said the Soupster, settling into the second-most-comfortable chair in Dorothy’s living room, which was still pretty darn comfortable. Dorothy handed him a bowl of popcorn.

“Something that really carries me away,” said the Soupster, cramming his mouth full. The week had been a frustrating one. “Something that makes me forget reality.”

“I got just the thing!” Dorothy said, pulling a recently-rented DVD of “Pacific Rim” off her coffee table. “How’s about skyscraper-sized sea monsters threatening America? Earth’s only hope an elite cadre of aces piloting equally gigantic robot-warriors?”

“Okay, okay” said the Soupster. “Let’s give it a try, Dottie.”

They settled in to watch the film, passing the popcorn bowl back and forth.

In the film, Raleigh Beckett — a robot pilot and our hero — is working construction on the “Wall of Life,” a towering barrier meant to repel the skyscraper-sized monsters. The grizzled commander of the gigantic robot pilots tracks Raleigh to the Wall of Life which is being built … wait… in Sitka, Alaska.

“Our Town!” sputtered the Soupster, gesticulating at the screen. “I don’t want to be reminded of anything having to do with Our Town. Please take it off!”

“Okay,” Dorothy said, ejecting the disk. “Oooh. oooh, ooh! Got just the thing!”

“What?” asked the Soupster.

“It’s perfect,” said Dorothy, walking over to her shelf of DVDs. “It’s a classic French adventure story.” She flashed a CD in the air. “Aha, Soupster! Jules Verne’s `Journey to the Center of the Earth.”

“Pat Boone and James Mason, Dottie? Didn’t they go into a volcano in Iceland?”

“And Arlene Dahl,” said Dottie. “But this is a newer version of `Journey.’ Stars Ricky Schroeder. I’ve been wanting to watch it.”

In the film, an all-grown-up Schroeder portrays an American adventurer enlisted by a wealthy woman to find her husband, who had disappeared on a journey to the center of the earth via an old Russian mine in Alaska.

But before the Soupster could say “Alaska” Schroeder and his crew rolled into a late 19th Century Sitka – complete with a replica of St. Michael’s Cathedral.

“No, no!” wailed the Soupster.

“Well, I can see you’re in no mood to hear my idea for the movie that I wanna make,” said Dottie. “About millions of communist fish pouring into Our Town all at once?”

The Soupster said, “Don’t tell me you’re going to call it…”

“`Red Herring!’” Dottie said.