Cocktails Before Dinner

Cocktails Before Dinner[1]

Series
Work In Progress
Original Broadcast Date
1986
Cast
Joe Frank
Format
Serious Monologue, Absurd Monologue 1 hour
Preceded by:	Case Studies
Followed by:	Dreamland

"In this modern technological age, we humans have more than made up for our physical inferiority to animals."

Cocktails Before Dinner is the name of a program Joe Frank produced as part of the series Work In Progress. It was originally broadcast in 1986.

Synopsis

• Making up for our inferiority to animals with technology.
• Our relationship to our bodies.
• Experiencing the moment of sleep, death. Ways to die.
• Breakfast at small tables.
• Remembering youth in a cab on the way to a hospital.
• Buying a gun to prepare for nuclear war.
• Our inability to comprehend the dimensions of the inverse.
• Alexander the Great finds a walled city, weighs a human eye.
• Being uncomfortable when an actor at a play emerged from the audience. The audience, everyone, as actors. Everyone as a star of their own life; life as recognition. Tonight's program from the viewpoint of his life, the audience's life.
• Houdini examined.
• "A jukebox or a coffin."
• Joe's past as a teacher: experiencing department meetings in the manner of a student. Sex among teacher and among students, the school's playboy sadist.
• Joe the filmmaker. A film about St. Florence, patron saint of the unexpressed, funded by dressmakers and shot in Iceland. Filming in white and black.
• Second person dialog with a hitchhiker.
• Mimicking those one visits.
• Description of a dance.

Music

• "Power Spot" - Jon Hassell (from Power Spot, 1986) | YouTube

• "Polaris" - Aragon, (from "Aragon", 1985)

• "Wing Melodies" - Jon Hassell (from Power Spot, 1986) | YouTube

Commentary

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