Bruce Lee waited for Lalo Schifrin on the set after all the work was done.
The two took their gym bags to Bruce Lee's home in suburban Kowloon Tang.
Bruce stepped into a sound proof room and wheeled in his bench press.
He then dragged a portable boom box. When he put the plates on the barbells he took out a small notebook and wrote down the type of exercise and sets and number of reps he would perform.
Click he pushed a button on the boom box. After a few seconds of silence, the theme music from "Mission Impossible" played.
Bruce did 4 sets of Incline Bench Presses. Then it was Lalo's turn. Lalo who had smoked marijuana (and used it professionally to create better music and to understand the phenomenon of music better), accepted the brownie filled with hashish that Bruce gave him.
Soon working out with weights didn't seem like much of a chore. They had a lot of energy and started to giggle during reps.
Then Bruce popped in a cassette. It was the familiar final work of Lalo with regard to the movie Enter the Dragon. It played the theme music. The crescendo and the drum beats and Bruce's opening Gung Fu screams made Bruce grab his gut in laughter. Then he started doing incline situps (crunches) like a madman, but very careful in keeping his neck back so that he wouldn't injure his neck.
Again they played the opening music song from Enter the Dragon as loud as possible. They could do so since it was encased in soundproof glass.
Bruce felt guilty about coming home when his wife and his children were sound asleep. He had been working hard that day on the Enter to Dragon movie.
It was April, 1973 (springtime). Tomorrow he thought he would leave the Concord studios production studio early, like at 1pm (after lunch)to spend quality time with Brandon & Shannon. The forecast was to be sunny, clear skies.
"You okay, Bruce?" Lalo asked.
"Yeah. Why I don't look okay?...I was just thinking of what I was going to do tomorrow after work. take the kids for ice cream."
Bruce smiled and then spotted Lalo as Lalo was performing a set of decline bench presses.
"You know Bruce of that ancient Chinese saying: If you teach a man how to fish, you can feed him forever, as opposed to fishing for him, in which case you feed him for one day," Lalo smiled at his friend.
"Yeah?"
"Well, thank you, Bruce, for teaching me how to fish."
Bruce's eyes opened wider and they shined. He had one of his famous ear-to ear smiles.
(please pass the popcorn)
Posted on Jan 17, 2009, 11:49 PM from IP address 65.88.88.252