All my life I have considered Elvis Presley as some old guy who died young. I was only 15 when he died at the age of 42 in the summer of '77. He was literally my father's age, born 2 days later, and his music? Old, even when I was a kid. Then there were all those capes and sequins and the sweat and the sneer; I just did not get it.
But today we went to Baz Luhrmann's biopic of the king, mostly because it was a movie that me and Heidi and her parents could all agree on. It was a long show, and I have mixed feelings about Tom Hanks as Colonel Parker, but I sure did not expect to find myself quite so emotional at the end.
Maybe it was spending time and going to the movies with Heidi's older parents, or my own senior discount at the ticket booth, or the fact that the character of Tom Parker was much closer in age to me now than Elvis ever would be. I just know that right before the end credits, when they rolled the footage of the real Elvis in Vegas in one of the last performances of his life, the weird old caricature of the guy I remembered was replaced by a young man a quick smile, and I was really sad that his life was cut short.
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