“You lead the strangest life.”

Ozzie (a friend of mine and Chicago cop in the Gang division and member of our local magic club) said this to me, on Sunday, as we hopped on a plane in Boston (or maybe it was Hartford) on our way home from a Magician’s convention near Cape Cod.  He was prompted to say the statement when, while trying to find my photo ID, I accidentally pulled out my Clergy card and had to explain to him why I have legal status as Reverend.

“You lead the strangest life.”

I told him that most of the time I didn’t even have to look for these things . . . they tend to come to me.  Case in point:  the Sunday before that…I found myself dead, my face in a plate of spaghetti, in Chicago, having been shot in the back of the head.

I didn’t ask for it.

But my brother, Nick, was acting in a student film in Chicago, a sort of Noir film about the mob’s top hit man, Fatso (he’s not fat…that’s just his name).  Nick plays the hit man.  The script was actually pretty neat and I like the fact that even though the movie is named after the character…he doesn’t actually speak any lines (all the dialogue goes to the mob boss villain and the bumbling killer he sends after the crafty Fatso).

That’s all well and good, Josh, but why were you dead in a plate of spaghetti?

Well, inner voice, an actor bailed out on them.  At the start of the film, the bumbling killer, sent to gack Fatso, kills the wrong man (and gets chewed out about it by his boss).  So . . . they needed an actor who looked kind of like Nick, was more heavy set, and could promptly show up with a fedora and overcoat.  Yeah…I guess that’s the part I was born to play…

Incidentally…I think that would be a cooler title, Dead in a Plate of Spaghetti.

My best days tend to be the ones where I don’t know where I’m going to be . . . and I learned something that day–under two inches of angel hair pasta and sauce, you can’t breathe.  But it seems like a cool little flick.  And Nick gets to burst out of a body bag, guns blazing, and kill everyone at the end.  I kind of envied him that . . . but then again, I got to play a hit man in a student film once upon a time, too . . .