Open-air cinemas! II-The great wait

Within a circle of a full year four seasons are showing us their different faces... As one replaces the other, beyond the weather change with all its effects, they bring out in us a different attitude in the way we feel.
We sometimes do prefer one season over another, that is understandable, but still, what is it about a season that makes it so special?
Between other things, it is also the anticipation of longing it! Of desiring it to come... And even if we love them all equally, it is this turnaround that we are waiting for...
More and more, in our modern society, we have managed to have everything we want, the way we want them and at the time we want... This is not necessarily a “bad thing” especially if one thinks of what was impossible to us, just yesterday! So, all is well, except maybe for the part that one will not know what anticipation is... Just imagine how it once was, by waiting the ice-cream man at the start of the summer, while not having ice-cream all year around, on demand...
I assure you this has nothing to do with “good old times” it simply has to do with the mindset of the knowing how to wait, and let some things come in their own time...

Extending this a bit further, and speaking from the Martial Artist point of view, this is also about the discipline of knowing how to, correctly, wait!
A necessity which particularly in Aikido is even greater as you are waiting to master the ways... of the Force!

Spring time and the movies are blooming
During the wintertime all open-air cinemas are locked down... But when they start to fill with little flowers and loud migrating-birds, this is the first sign that soon the summer will kick in and their magic screen will come back to life. Next sign, that will makes us chew our fingernails, are the movie posters (...once painted individually by hand!) that will precede and announce those movies we all have been waiting for... But not quite yet! Spring is full of surprises, one day you go out wearing a t-shirt, and the other you need a regular winter jacket and an umbrella. In order to watch a movie comfortably we will need to wait, still! And that is the beauty of it... It’s not about what you want, it’s about things falling into place... And then, the day will come when you will find yourself in the chair of an open-air cinema, under a starry sky, and see a story in moving pictures...

Outliving the countdown
It has maybe nothing to do with my training (or maybe everything?!) but since I was a small boy the long wait for a movie to arrive had a strange impact on me... and it still has!
So, knowing that a movie will arrive sometime next year or the year after that, always triggered the question: “...but will I be still around to see it?”
This is probably not out of fear of dying before I will be able to see a film, rather from a dying wish to see what will happen...
Looking back at my last sentence I see that dying is not excluded in either direction, but... what the hell!

At this point, and I mean right now as I put down these lines, it’s funny, amusing and agonizing at the same time, that I have the fingers of both of my hands full, with movie countdowns...
With one hand I have the comeback of “Star Wars-The Force Awakens” which is actually keeping me fully... awake, as we are just a few months away from its premier. Nothing to mention about the fact that it is a trilogy... but wait, I have only two hands with fingers on them, so let’s concentrate on the oncoming one.
And why do I have this strong feeling that we will, somehow, see Lord Darth Vader again? And if so, which side of the Force will he be on?! Because last time I checked, he died a Jedi!...

All this, while with my other hand I hold the mother of all countdowns for the 50th anniversary “Star Trek” movie, for which we have no name for it at this point... one more anticipation to our self-torture.
The promise so far is that, at last, the Enterprise will be as far away from Earth as possible, doing out there what it is supposed to do in the first place, if not to say “as it already was in the first place”
And now the big question! Did anybody think (...Leonard Nimoy himself definitely could have!) that they should make a few “takes” in order for “old” Mr. Spock to appear one last time? Since, as we all knew, his health was declining. It would be a disappointing neglect if not, because Mr. Spock was, and remains, one of the greatest TV-Movie heroes ever...

Furthermore, Star Trek (2009) did bring a new cast for being the crew of the Enterprise... In my personal view, they could not have done this any better... Each of them gave new life to something that old... And this is an achievement all by itself.
But there is still something missing... something that goes as far as back as the first episodes, of the first season, of the original series. One crew member was neglected even back then in the 60s.
Will they bring back, at least for that last movie of the new trilogy, Yeoman Janice Rand?!...
It is not an exaggeration to say that for those episodes that she played, the bridge did vibrate from her attractiveness... And that’s not all... If one pays attention to detail, Grace Lee Whitney, who died only a few weeks from writing this text, was playing excellently her part...
Because if they bring her back in the manner they did with all the others, then this will be to die for...
Oh, wait! Don’t die yet, we may have yet another countdown...
And a rendezvous under the stars!..

“All good things come
to those who wait”

July 14, 2015