On a Saturday in April, the day had come. At about 10:00 AM, the crew was to arrive at my parent's place, and the schedule was tight:
- 10:00 AM — 10:30 AM Gathering.
- 10:30 AM — 12:30 PM
Presentation of the puppets, and if necessary producing additional ones in a group effort. We finish the scenario and script. Do some readings.
- 12:30 PM — 2:00 PM Lunch time !
- 2:00 PM — 5:30 PM
Filming and editing the movie.
- 5:30 PM — 6:00 PM
Watching the movie (together with crew and parents).
- 6:00 PM
Casual goodbye.
Yep, we were true professionals.
Although the crew arrived on time, the schedule eventually appeared to be a bit ambitious to say the least. Perhaps the schedule should have been more like:
Jehovah.)
We succeeded in creating two more puppets out of a kind of foam which originated from the inside of the couch of Marbles's parental home. Apparently there was a hole in the bottom, and once every so often Marbles cut out some stuffing for "creative use." Needless to say, his parents did not know.
Also, by noon we had perfected the story line.
STORY LINE A family of rats are living a quiet but happy life.
They sing some songs.
Then, a mad professor comes along and kidnaps the youngest rat (for carrying out cruel experiments). We follow the adventures of his older brother (Randy), who will come to save him.
He sings some songs. Then saves his brother and kills the professor.
Then they all sing a song.
END.
By then, we were starving.
At my request, my mother, who was from German descent, had prepared "knuttels," a local recipe of a kind of dough balls which are cooked in boiling water. When the balls are fished out of the water, they grow way bigger in a bucket (with a towel on top, which is really necessary because of the yeast in the dough). This was a delicate stage in the making: even the slightest breath of air coming from an open door was enough to ruin the process of blowing them up.
(The first time I remember eating knuttels was at my grandmother's — the mother of my mother. And I think she got the recipe from her mother, and brought it with her to the US as a twenty-three year old woman, when the whole family moved near the end of 1938, shortly after Kristallnacht. Already since 1933, when Hitler's NSDAP had seized power, it was clear to my grandmother's close family that Nazi Germany promised so much pain to so many innocent people. They were German all right, but of the kind that hated the Nazi regime as much as its victims did. Forty years later my grandmother still spitted on the floor when so much as a word that resembled the word "Nazi" was mentioned in her house.)
Each of us got one or two balls — they had the size of a small sugar melon — topped with cold candy syrup and a hot custard-like sauce on a base of cinnamon. After one or two knuttel balls you got the feeling you'd had enough food till rapture, and that was just fine: they were even better the day after, when sliced into pieces of about an inch each, and fried in a pan. Even for Svenn, who didn't have breakfast so that he could stuff himself by noon, the aggressive knuttel dough injection was far too hard for his poor digestive system to apprehend. He did not know what hit him, just as he wouldn't know what hit him twenty years later, on that fatal day.
The only one besides me who could handle knuttels was — well — Marbles, of course. The man was so ignorant even as a child that his body did not notice whether food was heavy — or spoiled, or plastic — or not. And he enjoyed as only Marbles could.
After lunch, we were so worn out that the schedule suffered further damages. Eventually, we shot one (ONE !) song of the main rat character lip-synching "Back in the USSR" by The Beatles. We figured that the mad professor (obviously) had to be Russian, and then the CD catalogue of my parents handed us a first soundtrack song just like that.
(Another idea was a "song" from one of Wagner's operas suggested by my father, but the fact that we wanted to make the public — always the public — feel good, killed that idea rather efficiently.)
We also shot the entire kidnapping scene by the mad professor, who incidentally was played by my father, but after a first screening the crew democratically decided that the entire scene had to be deleted, because my father just seemed too gently.
When the parents finally arrived, we proudly showed them a three-minute movie of a rat singing The Beatles, and then we parted.
Svenn's parents wanted to stay for a drink — especially his father — but Svenn was eager to go home because he wanted to do his homework. So after about twenty minutes of small talk, they left. In Svenn's defence, I must say that they lived more than forty miles from my home, so it was kind of a smart thing to do.
We didn't get to see Mary's parents because an uncle came for Mary. At 6:00 PM sharp, the doorbell rang, and without a word Mary stepped outside and was gone.
The story was quite different with Marbles's parents: they gladly came in for a drink, ended up staying for dinner, and drove off around nine.
My parents were exhausted when things started to turn back to normal that day, but I suspect they had had a pretty good time as well.
All was good.