When you commute for enough years on a train or bus, you inevitably have an occasional random thought about some totally uncharacteristic thing you’d like to see happen, just once.
Call it a commuter bucket list.
Mine involves the film “Casablanca,” which comes to mind because on March 21, “Casablanca” is returning for a one-night stand in several hundred movie theaters.
More on that in a second. Meanwhile, back to me.
I am not objective on the subject of “Casablanca.” I’m obnoxious. You can ask my wife, who refuses to watch it with me anymore because I involuntarily say all the lines a second before the actors.
I’m the guy at the party who randomly says things like, “That is my least vulnerable spot” or “She’s coming back. I know she’s coming back.”
That may explain why I don’t get invited to many parties.
Anyhow, my iPod includes a six-minute excerpt from “Casablanca.”
It starts with Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) approaching Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in Rick’s Cafe and asking, “Monsieur Blaine, may I have a minute?” It ends with Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) telling Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), “Mademoiselle, you may have observed that in Casablanca, human life is cheap.”
In between, Victor has heard Major Strasser and his German officers singing “Die Wacht am Rhein” (“Watch on the Rhine”) and ordered Rick’s house orchestra to drown them out by playing “La Marseillaise.”
Even though Rick knows this incendiary act will infuriate Major Strasser, he nods approval. Against the backdrop of a world where the Germans have conquered France and occupied Paris, this defiant anthem becomes so stirring the whole cafe joins in.
Call it a cheap setup if you like. Me, tears well up in my eyes every time I see or hear it, including when I hear it on my iPod on the 6:24.
That’s where the commuter fantasy kicks in.
As I’m riding along I imagine “La Marseillaise” blasting through the whole car, echoing off expensive shoulder bags and forcing every head to look up from their smartphones and Kindles.
I envision one person, then two, then everyone starting to sing “La Marseillaise,” swelling to a finale that rattles the steel wheels and dissolves into shouts of “Vive La France!”
Okay, I know that’s less likely on the 6:24 in 2012 than it was in Casablanca in 1942.
So what, I say. You deal with commuting in your way and I deal with it in mine.
This much, however, should not be in dispute: No one has ever made a more justifiably beloved movie than “Casablanca.”
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