I have seen a lot of the unusual in my lifetime...not as much as some, but more than many. Last night, I witnessed a chart-topper.

I went to my first "screen on the green" yesterday evening--a lovely arrangement in which thousands of people picnic on the lawn of the National Mall and watch a movie at sunset on a big screen that faces the Washington Monument. Our movie on this crystal clear yet stiflingly humid evening was "The Way We Were" (a movie I later concluded would have made all of my past breakups make a heck of a lot more sense to me).

Anyway, before the movie started, we were treated to an old looney tunes short. It was the one where Bugs Bunny's rabbit hole flooded while he was asleep. His mattress drifted down a river to the castle of an "evil" scientist who sorely needed a brain for his mechanical monster. As I was watching, I realized how much the meaning of such a cartoon changes as one gets older...

But what happened next...

Do y'all remember the "HBO feature presentation" intro? It was about a minute long with a firework/laser kind of animation and a big graphic of HBO floating through space? Accompanied by some crazy disco trumpet music that is recognizable in a heartbeat?

Well that came on screen. As if it had been planned, thousands of picniking viewers jumped up and started dancing wildly, flailing arms and legs to the beat of the music! This continued until the conclusion of the animation, at which point every one of the thousand sat back down and acted as if nothing had happened.

It was one of those moments of suspended thought...did I just see that with my eyes or was that my imagination? Was it planned? And the strangest part of it all, why did my own reflexes start when I heart the first beat of the music?