Two things:
Weird thing the first:
About a week ago, a good friend of mine had his 30th birthday. He spent it out on the town with his girlfriend. When the evening was over, as she drifted off to sleep, his girlfriend asked him if he would sing the Bob Dylan song "Lay Lady Lay" to her. He did. So far, not weird. Read on.
This friend had been very close to his father, who died several years ago. While my friend is a passionate music fan, he didn't get it from his father, who never had much of a connection with the musical arts. The only song his father ever professed a real liking for, his only favorite song, was Lay Lady Lay. My friend had never mentioned this to his girlfriend, and he interprets it as a Happy Birthday from his father. I like to think it was too.
Weird thing the second:
Last summer in Maine, on a rustic island in the Damariscotta River, this same friend and I were sitting on the deck of his cabin, goofing around. We had each other (and onlookers) in stitches over one particular bit. We were talking to each other in the voice of Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies, and at some point we began singing, or, more accurately, reciting lyrics to popular songs using that voice. We randomly hit upon numbers from Grease at one point and those were the best. The line "I got chills, they're multiplying" brought the house down.
I just got a message from my friend which started by his saying, "I just saw something really weird." He went on to explain that Andy Serkis, the actor who played Gollum, was on Conan O'Brien tonight. At the end of his segment, he apparently goofed around in the voice of Gollum, and, you guessed it, started singing Grease songs. Whaaauauaaaa?!?!!?!
I haven't seen this yet, as I'm on the west coast, but the TiVo will grab it in an hour or so.
My friend's theory on this one goes something like this: When ideas are expressed, particularly one's that elicit a big emotional response, they gain a sort of cosmic traction. They get some kind of power to persevere and to travel, and sometimes they land on like-minded people. It's a spiritual tipping point, maybe.
It is of course arguable in which direction this transaction may have occured. We would like to think that we did it first, but who knows. It is also naturally attributable to coincidence, that ever-handy catch-all for the unexplained. My statistics skills aren't great, but it seems like a billion-to-one shot to me. That's some pretty obscure shit, Gollum singing "You're the One That I Want."
Or maybe it isn't. Maybe certain types of people just think in similar ways, and it's really not all that unlikely that they'll hit upon the same theme, if not as likely that they'll hit upon the exact same thing. Even if it is exactly the same, as this was, maybe it's one of those things that seems really impossible but in reality is more likely than we'd ever believe.
Nah.
