“Upside down you turn me…”
Ambigrams are clever pictures that are the same backwards and forwards, or right-side up or upside down, or angle-to-angle (soon to be made wildly popular with the movie adaptation of Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons, no doubt). And the 20th Anniversary DVD of a favorite movie of mine, The Princess Bride, features an ambigram:
Pretty neat, eh? I saw this movie for the first time on Thanksgiving Day, 1987. It was my freshman year at Mercyhurst College and I had just worked a 13 hour shift at Rebecca’s Restaurant where I was a bus slave. Really, my job at Rebecca’s was a great one; obviously so, I had been there for three years by the time I started college. The whole staff was amazingly cool - the bartender let us drink after-shift sometimes, the head waiter was a condescending prick with a wicked sense of humor (ah, Fred!) whom we all loved, the eponymous co-owner was a terrific woman with a thing for gay men, the wait staff was a trip and us bus kids… well, we thought we owned the place. On the Thanksgiving in question, I was to work the early shift, then go home to have dinner with my folks. However, just before I was supposed to leave, Fred told me that several of the bus kids who were supposed to be there, weren’t coming. They were “sick” or some such BS. Fred gave me the option to leave, but said they really needed the help that afternoon.
What could I do? I called my mom and told her to go ahead and eat without me. A work ethic is a terrible thing sometimes, right? Thank God Mom understood.
One other busser stayed for a second shift - Amy. By the time we were done it was way late and we were exhausted, but we couldn’t relax. Rebecca fed us and tipped us extra (from her own pocket, I think), so, feeling rich, Amy and I called our parents and said we were going to see a movie to unwind. The Princess Bride.
To say I howled and stomped and cried my way through the movie is a gross injustice to the embarrassment that Amy suffered that night. But The Princess Bride is still one of the best movies ever, and I say that with twenty years’ (!!!) worth of perspective and repeated viewings, not just through the lens of punchiness.
Jesus. Twenty years.
