OUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS KNOW that we don’t watch “television.” It’s not that we don’t have cable or do any streaming, we don’t even have our television set up to receive the standard local broadcasts. But we love good movies and television series! Our media of choice in seeing these is the increasingly antiquated DVD.
So we get the occasional call from a friend that goes something like this: “Neal, I have a box of DVDs that I don’t watch and wondered if you might want them . . .” Of course we want them and so, of course, we take them off our friends’ hands!
A coincidence is a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection.
We place our new acquisitions in stacks:
• movies we know we want to keep,
• movies we want to watch and determine if we want to keep, and
• movies we definitely do not want to keep or even watch.
Usually, these gifts come spaced apart so we know whose used DVD we are watching. This works best as it allows us to share opinions about the movies with the gifter. Recently, we found ourselves with two new piles of discs and they were mixed up while sorting them into their appropriate stacks.
This led me to grab a pair of movies as a late-night double-feature: Big Doll House from the Roger Corman Classics series (1972) and Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown from 1997.
Of course, I knew who Corman and Tarantino were but knew nothing about either movie.
And this takes us on a detour in this article to look at coincidences.
A remarkable concurrence of events
Merriam-Webster’s primary definition of coincidence is “the act or condition of coinciding.” They offer four variations of the definition of coincide:
1a. to occupy the same place in space or time;
1b. to occupy exactly corresponding or equivalent positions on a scale or in a series;
2. to correspond in nature, character, or function; and
3. to be in accord or agreement.
Merriam-Webster’s secondary definition of coincidence is “the occurrence of events that happen at the same time by accident but seem to have some connection.”
While I am a BIG fan of Merriam-Webster, I am going with the Google Dictionary definition here: “a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection.”
And I may be interpreting the word remarkable a bit loosely.
Pam Grier and Big Doll House
My double-feature opened with Big Doll House, an exploitation movie from 1971, the same year that Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft made blaxploitation movies a big deal. It was a success at the box office with a more than 50-to‑1 return on production costs.
The movie opened with a very attractive woman being taken to what looks like a prison in a Third World country. In the background, a woman sings:
I’ve been locked away so long now, I forgot my crime.
Been working on the road now, I’ve been working by the sea.
Been working near them cane fields and I wanna be free.
Ninety-nine years is such a long, long, long time.
Ninety-nine years is a long, long time.
I’m a long time woman, ain’t nobody to please.
Got a natural feeling like a bad disease.
Well, ninety-nine years is a long, long, long time.
Ninety-nine years is such a long, long, long time.
Ninety-nine years is a long, long time.
It was an okay song and an okay performance but didn’t do much for me. Neither did the movie. I am not a fan of poorly scripted, poorly directed, and poorly acted movies. I didn’t last twenty minutes before I turned it off.
Then I put on the Tarantino movie.
Pam Grier and Jackie Brown
I knew nothing about Jackie Brown. I actually thought it was a martial arts movie! It stars Pam Grier, which was a nice bit of coincidence. The movie opens with Across 100th Street playing in the background, Bobby Womacks’s gritty look at inner-city life.
The song was written and recorded for the 1972 movie of the same title. Its use here is an example of Quentin Tarantino’s references and allusions to popular culture—especially movies and music—from the ’60s and ’70s that pop up in his movies.
About twenty minutes into the movie, the same song that had opened Big Doll House started playing:
I’m a long time woman and I’m serving my time.
I’ve been locked away so long now, I forgot my crime.
Been working on the road now, I’ve been working by the sea.
Been working near them cane fields and I wanna be free.
Turns out it was Pam Grier singing Long Time Woman, written and recorded for Big Doll House. It was one of the few recordings she made in her career. It was also another of Tarantino’s allusions to pop culture of the past.
I didn’t know the track at all and it wouldn’t have mattered to me at all if the night hadn’t been a double-feature and I hadn’t tried to watch Big Doll House an hour earlier.
And, yeah, maybe I’ve spent a bit too much time indoors the past year—who hasn’t?
And maybe I’m getting a little bit long of tooth—who isn’t?
But little things like little coincidences remind me of how funny—how amazing—life is.
To hear Bobby Womack’s Across 100th Street, click here.
To hear Pam Grier’s Long Time Woman, click here.
It was double-feature night and little did I know that both movies featured the same actress and the same song in their soundtracks, even though they were made 25 years apart. Click To Tweet
FEATURED IMAGE: The photo at the top of this page is the lovely Pam Grier in Jackie Brown. The movie also features Robert Forster, Michael Keaton, and Robert DeNiro, and especially boffo performances by Samuel L. Jackson and Bridget “Surfer Girl” Fonda.
Mystically liberal Virgo enjoys long walks alone in the city at night in the rain with an umbrella and a flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig who strives to live by the maxim, “It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.
I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a college dropout (twice!). Occupationally, I have been a bartender, jewelry engraver, bouncer, landscape artist, and FEMA crew chief following the Great Flood of ’72 (and that was a job that I should never, ever have left).
I am also the final author of the original O’Sullivan Woodside price guides for record collectors and the original author of the Goldmine price guides for record collectors. As such, I was often referred to as the Price Guide Guru, and—as everyone should know—it behooves one to heed the words of a guru. (Unless, of course, you’re the Beatles.)
