[Desert_Screams]

Max, damn your brilliant hide, this is easily the best thing you've written on this site, and easily one of the very best essays of the year gone by. Trimming away the wonderfully lunatic fringes-- Gary Busey, the STAR WARS stuff-- there's some profunidity in there.

Yes, profundity. A word that looks wrong no matter how long you look at it. And I look at it a long-assed time, believe you me.

Jesus and Santa in the bar-- although it sounds like the set-up to a joke Henny Youngman might have discarded in the early '70s-- is some great character work and honest-to-Xenu pathos, but the best thing here (IMNSHO) is Santa as the derailing nightclub magician. I don't think we should hope for a Burbank piece that sounds like Mamet; we should wait for something by Mamet, that sounds like Burbank. 'Cos that Burbank fella, he's damned good.