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| Story | Cast | Characters | Quotes | Trivia | Script | |
Retrospective
It was 1999, and we were very, very glum.Chris Tso was a fraud analyst for Aerial Communications in Rosemont, Illinois, where his job was to track down abusers of the cellular phone system. It took him away from the golf course and called for him to be up before noon every day of the week. He hated it.
Craig Long was a struggling first-year teacher saddled with classes that would never be accused of being ambitious future voting citizens of America (and that is a kind estimate). He hated it as well.
When we graduated college, we realized there were no more yearbooks. There were no more graduation parties. Each and every day of working in an office or sweating in front of a group of pre-pubescent adolescents was what we had to show for over five years of undergraduate drunkenness. We realized that our jobs would pick up and all wasn’t quite as bad as it looked (and indeed, this turned out to be true), but we needed an outlet. Something to vest ourselves into, something out of the ordinary. And thus, Thursdays at Dooley’s was born.
Originally, we just wanted to make a compilation of songs. Then, wouldn’t you know it, Tso was laid off from his job and had all sorts of time on his hands, while Long decided to go back to graduate school and was thus left with a free summer before starting school. Long came up with the idea of transforming the CD into a movie soundtrack (coming up with the story before he saw Gattaca, thank you very much). The CD took shape gradually, over the course of many late nights and weekends in the suburban area. We took pictures, trying to pose for action shots without feeling like too much of a couple of horses' asses, and we embarrassedly asked our friends for candids for their “characters.” Most obliged willingly enough, and for that, we thank them.
It cannot be stressed enough that the whole project was symbolic of a specific frame of mind and not simply an illustration of any blooming alcoholism on our parts. Dooley’s became a refuge from the working world, a place where we could forget we were actually responsible for something and expected to earn our respective salaries. It was a midway point between Rolling Meadows and Hanover Park; it was quiet yet lively; it was relaxation and exhilaration all in one. It was where the waitresses knew our names and the bartenders didn’t even wait to be asked for an order. Eventually the staff would change, but the jukebox stayed the same, and our appetites for beer and buffalo wings remained unchanged.
Dooley’s is a nice place to hang out, but neither of us is saying we want to move in there. What we’re getting at is that it became a sort of focal point of our respective social lives. We had friends there on occasion, went there solo on occasion, but Thursday nights were the nights to recollect ourselves and reassess where we were after that particular week. It became a reference point, as in, “Well, I don’t remember when we saw that movie; let’s see, it was three days after Dooley’s, so . . . oh yeah, it was on Sunday.”
We first got the idea for a commemorative CD when listening to the same tracks on the jukebox for perhaps the umpteenth time in a row. We thought how great it would be to have a little pocket of this current lifestyle in our music collection at home, to appreciate years from now when perhaps we weren’t blessed with such an invigorating environment and social circle (cough, pause for sarcasm). So we started putting the music together, and after that we started putting together a movie story to accompany the mock soundtrack, a la Killroy was Here.
What you have in your hands may or may not hit the big time, but that’s not really important. What is important is that we had fun doing it, and now we only have to come up with an idea for a Part II. Otherwise, we’ll have to go back to work in the morning and earn our money. Fuck that.
Copyright 2001 Tso Long Productions ©