Guest and Levy simply take reality a few steps over the line in these things. I swear to you that everyone in "Best in Show" is out there in the show dog world. If you have ever been involved in community theater or a town's anniversary celebration or even a yearly festival, then you know all those people in "Guffman."

The song lyrics remind me of a true story which makes the film even more real........Dave Van Ronk wrote what is to me one of his dumbest songs alternately known as "River Come Down" and "Bamboo" as it was called when recorded by PPM. It's a kinda' dumb thing at best. Anyway, it's the late sixties and I'm at our campus coffeehouse in Berea. Once a month we had these huge nights where we had kids from UK and EKU and anywhere else there as an open mic thing. WE had moved past PPM, liked Dylan's stuff, but were discovering Jean Ritchie and Doc Watson. A lot of the UK and EKU groups and singles were still in the hootenanny phase.

On this night,a trio was singing "Bamboo" which they had learned from PPM but somehow never tied the title to what they were singing and it resulted in a "Group Mondegreen" of sorts. The first verse is:

You take a stick of bamboo,
you take a stick of bamboo,
you take a stick of bamboo,
you throw it in the water,
Oh, oh, Hanaah.

........and then you repeat it again. I turned to Jeff next to me and said, "Are they saying bamboo or pepper?" He agreed it was pepper as well and we both cracked up. First, the song is stupid enough; why are you throwing bamboo in the water? But second, when did pepper start coming in sticks? And even if it did, would you have chunk of it with you at the river? And more to the point, didn't these people read the title and figure out that the word was bamboo? Obviously not. We talked to them later and the one guy insisted we were wrong!!!

Spaw