Soul Train events (1 of 2): Doc.

So the other weekend I went to a (sold out!) screening of a documentary about "Soul Train" where Don Cornelius appeared afterward:

1) As this tall young (black) guy with artful dreads and a leather jacket walked by, the ticket-taker was like, "That's his son!"

2) Before the film started, this one skinny (light-skinned black) woman in a baseball caps and athletic suit was chit-chatting to everyone in seats on every side of her - when I sat down she was talking about how the first time she heard Donna Summer (Summers?) sing "Love to Love Ya Baby" it just bowled her over - and then she was saying how nice it was to see such a diverse audience, "'cause that makes you see that Soul Train wasn't just a black thing, it was an *everyone* thing."

So, I slid forward and was like, "Sorry, I couldn't help overhearing you..." and then told her about my one (Puerto Rican) friend with (Indian) parents who got hooked on good music through watching Soul Train as a kid.

"Even today," I was like, "When he hears a song, he'll say a lot of times, 'That's nice, but it doesn't have enough butter in it.'"

"Ha!", the lady was like, "Butter! I like that, I'm gonna have to use that. You see, when he say 'butter', he really mean, 'soul'."

Then, she started talking about how she had been at the Texas State Fair and had tried deep-friend butter there, and the (white) woman next to her started talking about how at some state fair she had tried a Krispy Kreme burger, where they make up a burger but put it between 2 Krispy Kreme donuts.

3) Everyone sang and clapped to all the songs in the movie, but my favorite part was when some (black) woman behind me shouted out when a young Chaka Khan was briefly on screen, "Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, look at that waist, mmmmmmmmmmm!"

Afterwards, I turned around, and the noisy women behind me turned out to be very staid, tastefully-dress (black) women in their upper 50s.

I also liked how in the doc they said that in the 1st year of Soul Train, the local tv show order for kids was Soul Train, Speed Racer, and the 3 Stooges, and some (black) guy shouted out from the audience, "That's right!"

4) Don Cornelius was a douche to everyone.

He was talking about how he and the announcer (some local radio or tv personality) had always been smooth, "and we're both still smooth, only now you're smooth and round!"

He introduced his ex-wife as the mother of his children, but then was saying he doesn't know what she's up to or who she gets down with anymore, though she probably is getting down, and then he apologized and was like "Sorry, she's a cancer, she's always been a one-man woman."

When some local docent asked for addresses of a past place he lived in Chicago so she could include it on a Black Pride South Side tour, he just said that would take some doing, and never offered to get that info back to her later, though the announcer jumped in and named the local high school he graduated from.

When someone during Q&A asked him if he still kept up with the dancers, he got all abashed and was like, "Uh, no.... That was 1971, that was 40 years ago, that was a long time..."

He seemed to be going senile, but I think your true character starts to show through when that happens.