This title comes from Julianne last night at Pig Pile. It’s origin from a stand ups set has to do with masturbating creativity. Let’s see what sort of movie comes from that fact.
Lone Banana
We open in an office building and people are talking about the previous weekend’s Halloween parties and such. They share pictures and stories until we hear the chime of an elevator and a silence comes over the office. The camera turns and we see a man walking through in a banana costume. He sits at his desk, puts his things down and gets to work.
An older woman comes over and asks him “Curtis, what’s going on?” He looks up and just says he’s starting work on some report and was about to call a client. She tells him he should really think about what he’s doing before the boss sees him. He looks at her a bit confused. She turns towards Karen, a younger employee who she calls friendly with Curtis to take him outside and figure out what is going on.
Karen talks to the older woman and tells her that they just chat friendly at work. She tells Karen that it seems like Curtis likes her and that he needs help today. Karen agrees and takes Curtis back outside. She tries to ask him about what is going on and he instead invites her to the park with him. He dodges questions about the banana costume and she notices some dirt and red specks on the back of the costume.
He takes her on more adventures and she starts to have just as much fun as him. She takes his phone and sees that he has a ton of missed calls from numbers listed as ‘Home’, ‘Chris Home’, ‘Tyler Home’, and ‘John Home’ that she remembers as friends he has talked about. She dials the numbers for Chris, Tyler, and John but gets no answer and a full mailbox.
He gets them ice cream, they paddle boat, visit the roof of the ESB, and get on a ferry to the Statue of Liberty. One the island as he runs off to the line to climb the statue she notices a newspaper headline about an accident on Halloween night. It details a group of friends dressed as bananas that were killed in a car accident. The friend who was driving was the only one to survive.
She confronts him in the crown of the statue and he tries to run. She stops him and he breaks down. He tells her that he couldn’t take off the costume. He would just see in his head the EMS cutting the costumes off his friend’s bodies. He blames himself for their deaths. They always pushed him to get out and have fun. He was always the one who worked too much and hardly drank or partied. He wasn’t drunk but he was the one that wanted to leave the party that night. His friends begged him to stay. If he just lived more they would still be alive.
She takes his hand and tells him that they would be proud of him for being out today. But what they would never want is for him to run away from his problems. It’s no different from hiding himself in his work. He agrees and asks Karen to help him out of his banana costume. She takes it off and they leave it there as she walks him down the steps hand in hand.