The Zelig-Kokonuts Effect

In 1983, Woody Allen came out with Zelig, a mockumentary (a term used now but not then, I don't think) movie that cleverly features the character Leonard Zelig showing up in authentic-looking footage with the likes of Hitler, Stalin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone, Babe Ruth, et cetera et cetera almost ad nauseam. Somehow Zelig, the human chameleon, seems to show up effortlessly throughout history's panorama of personalities, both good and bad.

This was way before the tedious and more contrived Forrest Gump.

Yesterday, there was a rare convergence of this phenomenon: the Zelig-Kokonuts Effect.

The fictional Pawlie Kokonuts was walking in the non-fictional downtown, in the environs of his former place of employment, when, lo and behold, one of the prickly principals (with who knows what principles) in that former drama, is standing on the public sidewalk being interviewed, stagily, by who knows whom, boom microphone and professional-looking camera equipment on hand, all that; or perhaps it was a commercial or a political campaign kickoff or a videotaped deposition or a mockumentary that would entice someone like me to blog about it, citing the mockumentary Zelig.

The fictional Pawlie Kokonuts, Zelig-like, was tempted to walk poker-faced between the camera's angle of vision and the two subjects (subject and object? actors? participants? quasi-principled principals? interviewer-interviewee? game show host and contestant?) of the celluloid drama unfolding. An uninvited player in an playa's play.

Instead, the fictional Mr. Kokonuts calmly kept to the opposite side of the street, no juvenile V signs, no obscene gestures, no smirks, no waves, no picking of his nose, no gawking, no shouts, no coughs, no pregnant pauses, no poses. A pedestrian in the most pedestrian of backgrounds. Nevertheless, a ghost in the footage, for sure. An uninvited guest in the public realm. A blurred memory in the Zapruder archive of the Modern Workplace. The quintessential presence of absence.

(Mr. Kokonuts, we're so proud of you for behaving. Or are we?)