Band on the Run

You don't even know what makes you think of it, but suddenly you can't shake the image in your mind of Lauren Ambrose sitting in a diner at the end of Can't Hardly Wait. You see a low, early morning sun in the plate glass behind her and it flares out through the camera lens and reminds you of a photograph. You wish you were her, you wish you were there. You can hear Band on the Run playing in your head, the raucous, spontaneous version from the end of that Broken Social Scene video, or even just the Paul McCartney and Wings version. You get a little chill in your spine.

You wish you could have that moment, that it could have been one that belonged to you. You want to be on a trip, driving through the North America Middlewest with your friends. You want to be getting up at dawn or not sleeping the night before and pulling into a diner, still nursing a hangover or coming down off a high when you arrive in the parking lot. You want to sit there talking loudly and laughing a lot while a waitress begrudgingly or even happily refills everyone's coffee cups and you all say "Thank you." And she smiles. There's a musical flourish and the screen starts to darken making all the oranges and dirty yellows of the morning more pronounced, and a girl with curly red hair lifts a cup of coffee to her lips and grainy white text proclaims, 'The End'.

The credits roll, but then the colours come back and you know that it's not over. It's never ever over.