Leprechaun in the Hood

I hopped into the crew van this morning and the rain was so dense you could see out the window. I was tired. Like, I have just worked the past seven days in a row and my bed is jealously implying that I am having affair with another, tired. So naturally I feel asleep.

I crawled out of the white fifteen passenger van some where in upstate New York and water was already finding it’s way up my coat and down my sleeves.

The morning was I hated myself for still working the job. The rain was making the whole staff impatient. Everyone was biting the others neck seeing who would bleed first. And I just didn’t feel like dealing with the pressure, the blame, or the lack of appreciation as one of the film businesses lowest paid staff.

I stuck to my assigned task, minding a pair of 8 year-old twins whose mother sat to the side and waited for my instruction before she herself would wrangle the kids.

The rain had stopped and the sun hid some where behind the still heavily clouded sky and I found myself in the basement of a multi-million dollar mansion.

The children who resided in the house where holed up with the twins and myself, occasionally the stand-ins or one of our principal actors would come down and escape the on- set mayhem. The finished basement was equipped with a pinball machine, pool table, poker table, and of course a movie theater with plush leather seating.

After I refused to play poker for the fifth or sixth time, the resident boy asked me if I “want to watch something funny.” The boy, if I had to guess I would say he was 10 or so, and Ice T were sitting in the movie theater and Chris was either back upstairs or working his magic on the pinball machine when I stepped in and took a seat.

The first few minutes were frightening. I have never been a fan of movies about the small evils that lurk in the night. As the title sequence scrolled I had to walk out and check on the twins. I walk back into the theatre just as Ice T pops his head into frame. With a foot high afro tweed bellbottoms, platform shoes, and a fur blazer, Ice T now in a leather coat and suit pants watched himself in Leprechaun in the Hood.

And there I sat awkwardly trying not to laugh at his costume in the film, how on screen Ice acts just as pimp as he does in real life, and the sheer ridiculousness of me sitting in a mansion watching a Leprechaun terrorizing the hood.