I was supposed to play
Robin in a new
Batman movie. The unique thing about this movie was that the
heroes only wore their masks for the first scene, then kept them off for the rest of the show. This was intended to cater to the
teenage girl crowd, so that they could stare at the handsome male leads (don't count this as
narcissism, I didn't look anything like I do
IRL).
The first scene involved rappelling down a high, sheer wall. Batman and I removed our masks, tied thick blue cords around ourselves, and jumped. I was in freefall for two or three seconds before I yanked the rope to the side to slow my descent. Batman reached the bottom, and I shot back up to the top. Apparently we were each tied to opposite ends of the same rope. This was all according to plan. I untied my rope and headed away from the wall's edge, finding myself on a set of narrow wooden beams above the floor of a department store. While jumping and crawling from beam to beam, I accidentally put my weight on a piece of thin plywood and crashed through, falling to the floor below. I was basically uninjured, but concerned shoppers crowded around and asked if I was all right. Quite out of character, I told them it was all in the script, picked myself up, and moved on.
Still in the Robin persona, I was headed on a missionary expedition to the nation of Tonga. I walked through a beautiful countryside near what looked like English castles, on my way to the river where I was to meet the expedition. Old women in Mother Teresa garb followed me, asking questions. I told them where I was headed, and they pointed to a high, rocky cliff, saying I would have to go up. Unable to scale it, I walked along a narrow ledge in an attempt to go around to a shallower grade. One of the women, now on a similar ledge across a gap from me, shouted that I was still going the wrong way, but I told her I was going around, and she relented. Instead she asked me why I was doing the job I was. After a moment's thought, I replied, "Money." The woman nodded, and wrote that down on a memo pad. "What else?" she asked. "Girls," I said. She wrote that down, and asked two more times, "What else?", to which each time I replied "Um... girls," again. I realized that she hadn't really written "Girls" three times, but "Comfort," "Security," and "Prosperity." I asked her why she'd done that, and she replied with a smile, "When you get a girl, she'll provide for you and care for you, so you will be happy." I didn't have the heart to tell her that such things didn't quite work out that way in the movie biz.
I made it to the river, but the expedition wasn' t waiting there. There had been some kind of disaster. The boat was in pieces, floating down the river, and the crewmembers were nowhere to be seen. I decided to do what I could, picking up pieces of the boat, wading and swimming toward its intended destination. The pieces were not very boat-like; the ones I can recall were pins from the backs of beeper tags like at JC Penney's. I eventually made it to a shallow, fast-flowing part of the river amid jungle huts, where I walked double-speed due to the current. I started to clamber out of the water near what looked like a campsite, but an old man told me to go around and through a lashed-together wooden archway instead. I did so, and the natives (looking suspiciously like the women from earlier) came warily to greet me.
"You're a missionary? From the boat?"
"Yes, the boat. The Euphoria. The Happy Euphoria."
But none of the other crew had arrived. They had turned back long ago. I found myself back at an "expedition office," explaining the situation to a secretary. "When will the Euphoria be leaving again?" I asked. But she couldn't find it on her big calendar. I realized she was as socially inept as I, and so with frustration told her, "Fine, fine. I guess I'll just have to come back here every two days to check."