Yoda For a Day

Two things stood out about this first exchange. One, the bag person didn't seem to care that I was speaking in grammatically mutilated phrases. Two, nobody on the subway paid any attention to our little tête-à-tête. As a rule, of course, New Yorkers tend to bury their heads in their newspapers when riding the subway, avoiding eye contact in the mistaken belief that if you don't look at muggers, they won't mug you. Furthermore, nobody in New York is surprised if you speak to them in broken English, because half the people in New York speak broken English. I would also point out that my costume wasn't far off from what the transient was wearing.

Already in midtown by now, I stopped in at Starbucks. "Have will I your largest caffe latte, yes, um," I told a girl at the counter. "Venti or grande?" she inquired. Here we had hit upon the crux of le problème Yoda. Two decades ago, when Yoda first burst onto the pop culture scene, the United States of America was still a country where people spoke a lingua franca. It was called English. But since that time coffee bars like Starbucks have so corrupted the English language with their bogus terminology ("grande" means "large" in any language I know of, but at Starbucks it means "medium") that the disparity between Yoda-talk and ordinary conversation has virtually disappeared. Thus, even though I spent the next couple of hours mumbling semi-oracular phrases to everyone I came into contact with, nobody seemed to give a damn.

"Help you I can, yes," I told an old woman crossing the street.

"Thanks," she said.

"Stay and help you I will," I told another senior citizen struggling to get across Madison Avenue.

"Through the Force, you will see other things: the future, the past, friends long gone." I told a waitress.

"Uh-huh."

And so it went. I spoke to people about the history of the Jedi knights. No one much cared. I told people that if they ever started down the Dark Side, it would destroy them. I suspected they thought I was talking about Gary Larson. Before long, I'd decided that being Yoda wasn't nearly as amusing as I'd thought it was going to be. Sure, it was fun being an incoherent jerk, but it wasn't nearly as much fun as tearing off women's blouses and pouring Perrier all over them the way I had when I was Mickey Rourke for a day. And it wasn't nearly as much fun as speaking with a stammer and saying things like, "Frankly, I've always thought of myself as a bit of a whoopsie," the way I did when I was Hugh Grant on British TV.

Thinking maybe I'd failed to update my take on Yoda--he's supposed to be about 40 years younger in The Phantom Menace--I decided I'd try out one of Yoda's lines from the trailer for the new movie. It seemed to me that he was still mumbling the same type of gibberish, but why not make the effort? "Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suuuuuuffferiiiiing," I said to a pretzel salesperson. He just looked at me.

Being a know-it-all mutant all day was getting kind of boring.

That's when I decided to shake things up a bit by actually putting on a Yoda mask. Now people would pay more attention to me because I looked a lot like Yoda. How could I fail to get a rise out of my fellow citizens? Well, this was an even more disappointing experience. People did look my way as I ambled along in my Yoda getup, but they weren't particularly interested in anything I had to say. I was just a living, breathing sight joke.

And not necessarily that memorable a sight joke. Here I'd always thought Yoda was a fixture of American folklore, as bright a star in the mythological firmament as Snow White or Mr. Pink. But most of the little kids who passed by me in Central Park didn't have the faintest idea who I was. I think they simply wrote me off as an extra from The X-Files or something.

The German tourist who asked to have her picture taken with me probably thought I was merely an undercover cop with bad skin. The most deflating experience of all occurred when I clambered aboard a horse at the Central Park merry-go-round to have my picture taken. The ticket taker didn't even blink that a six-foot Yoda was riding his merry-go-round.

As I dismounted from the horse I was accosted by an attractive young woman with a small boy named Alex. The woman wanted to know what we were doing. I explained that I was being Yoda for a day. She asked if I was doing it for fun or business. I told her it was a mixture of both. She was concerned that I might be making fun of the whole Star Wars genre by impersonating Yoda. I said that I was doing precisely that, because I basically felt that movies were, in fact, a joke. A wonderful joke, but a joke all the same. She said that this was not true of all movies. Oh, yes it was, I insisted, and launched into one of my prefab tirades about the pomposity of moviemakers, going out of my way to vehemently trash Life is Beautiful for no reason other than that I was sure she adored it. As all women with children named Alex would. Seeing that this conversation wasn't going anywhere, she asked if she could have a picture taken of me and Alex sitting together on a park bench. But Alex wasn't in the mood, and neither was I. Me and kids named Alex don't connect.

After she left, I realized that this Yoda thing was a total disaster. As opposed to my previous impersonations, where I'd managed to stay completely in character for the duration of the enterprise, I'd gotten so pissed off by this woman that I'd dropped Yoda's persona and Yoda's mannerisms and Yoda's syntax and gone back to talking the way I always talked: like a movie critic with a chip on his shoulder. That night, I went home completely crushed. The Day of Yoda had been a complete bust. No fun. No laughs. No catharsis. Worst of all, I hadn't been able to stick to my original game plan of remaining weird and incomprehensible, but vaguely cuddly. By the time I got to my office the next day, I was just about ready to bag the whole thing. Suddenly, the phone rang.

"Hello, may I speak to the person who handles your long-distance telephone account?" said the man on the other end.

Right then and there, it hit me like a thunderbolt! What was the point in being Yoda unless I could somehow put Yoda to work for me? Remember, what Yoda really had going for him was not the fact that he was cute and cuddly, but the fact that he was obtuse, strange and unbelievably annoying. That was the thing that had attracted me to him in the first place. And here was my chance to shine.

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