Sept. 5: Hakuna Matata

The circumstances surrounding my first and only viewing of The Lion King were not happy.

It was February of 1995 and I had just embarrassed myself by writing, producing, directing, and starring in the worst one-act-play known to man. When my unfortunate cast and I took our final bow that terrible evening, there wasn't even polite applause. The audience was stunned that they had sat through one hour of misogynistic garbage.

I did not go home. I did not want to debrief with my family - to be told that "next year would be better" or that "it might be best if you refrained from this sort of thing again." Instead, I ran away. I slept in my car one night (nearly froze to death), stayed at friends' apartments some other nights, and saw a lot of movies.

The reason why I saw a lot of movies was that on my birthday, I had received a $100 gift certificate for the movie theatre. This I exhausted during that terrible three-day stretch in the mid winter of the Year of Our Lord, 1995. I saw Forrest Gump (over-rated), Pulp Fiction (genius), and (I think) Shawshank Redemption. 

And I saw The Lion King. I think the reason I saw it was that it was cold out and I had no particular place to go and The Lion King was the only movie starting in the next 15 minutes. I knew enough about movies to know that a good story is a good story and that one shouldn't care about the rating or the format (ie. animation.) I had long outgrown animated movies and nurtured an unfounded mistrust for Disney, but, obviously, I decided to give The Lion King a chance. 

By the time the first act was over, my dominant thought was "Good grief, this movie is just like MacBeth." Both MacBeth and Lion King feature villains seizing the throne, the death of the king, and justice (or revenge) in the end. I was not the first to think that (as Chuck Klosterman says, I've never had a thought that 100 people haven't had before me) and, when I read the reviews later on, saw that many critics had observed similar parallels.

Today, I learn that the Lion King characters of Timon and Pumbaa were based on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two supporting characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet. I also learn that Timon and Pumbaa's song, Hakuna Matata, is a Swahili phrase meaning "no worries." It was adopted by Elton John and Tim Rice, who wrote a song with that title for the movie.

I am ashamed to say that Hakuna Matata is what I remember the most about Lion King, and for only one reason (a reason my mom will hate.) It is that one of the characters - Pumbaa, I think - came very close to singing the word "farted."  

I also remember an earlier scene where the young lion (Simba, I think) was confiding to his dad (James Earl Jones, I think) about his guilt eating animals. He just didn't think it was fair. James Earl Jones told young Simba that it's all part of the circle of life and that when lions die, they fertilize the ground, which makes plants grow, which are eaten by the herbivore animals who will later be eaten by lions.

Weak argument, I thought. If I was Simba, I would have asked James Earl Jones if the plants scream and cry and experience a whole lot of pain while they're being eaten by antelopes and zebras. But I guess a Disney movie is no place for Darwin.

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There are people out there who have mastered Hakuna Matata. I am not one of them. I have worries. I worry about my son's health (lately he has taken to perennial fist-clenching.) I am worried about an incipient pain in one of my molars; I wonder if a root canal is in my near future. 

And I should take comfort in the words of the Lord, who charged that "Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?"

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Perspective, as always, changes things. And yes, I know that half the world would change places with me in a heartbeat. I live in a country that has socialized medicine and, although I am no longer a full-time newspaper employee, I still have rewarding work as an independent journalist and as a magician.

And I also have a loving woman in my corner, a daughter who is set to make a real splash in her chosen industry, and a son who just completed his first day of Grade 6.

So no worries. Hakuna Matata indeed.

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Footnote: I stopped feeling sorry for myself about a week after the play ran and returned home, though I made it clear that I didn't want to talk about the experience at all. And I did write another play and mounted it at the following year's festival, where I won the best original script award. My happiest memory of my early 20s.