“where are you headed,” asked the woman with a thick long island accent shortly after she and her family hopped into the shared shuttle servicing the island from laguardia airport.
“a wedding in rokonokonokoma,” i said, intentionally mispronouncing ronkonkoma in such a way as to simultaneously indicate to that her know that i wasn’t from around “here”, that i was amenable to “small talk” and that i had probably watched the movie fletch one too many times.
her husband happily chimed in that the town was right next to lake ronkonkoma which was the setting for a new movie by m. night shyamalan. he mumbled soemthing about a local legend that has been passed on about a native american woman who died by falling through the ice on the frozen lake while grieving for for her husband who was killed on the night before they were to wed. and now, every year a ghostly apparatition of a woman lures young men to their death by getting them to swim to the middle of lake where they presumably drown from exhaustion. supposedly the lake, which was cut out from the land by an ancient glacier, is so deep that it is effectively bottomless and the bodies of the poor victims are never recovered.
as we passed the exit for amityville ( yes, amityville ), i started to slip into my own sleep-deprived version of an the m. night shyamalan’s visa commercial; listening to the nice couple get into a terse discussion about whose fault it was her father’s phone number never got loaded into the cell phone, suddenly becoming very aware that the shuttle van driver had no qualms about changing lanes before the other drivers had time to move over, while recalling the woman had said with a tight smile, “you really should put your seatbelt on,” just as the side door to the van slammed shut, eavesdropping on the college boy sitting next to me with his well-to-do mother as he said, “are they drinkers? i hope they are, because drinkers are much easier to talk with.” all the while, i was silently composing in my head the backstory for how a historic and popular wedding venue ( later, according to my sister the new bride, the wedding chambers were even a bit musty and old smelling! fabulous! ) could be set against a backdrop associated with such a morbid tale, complete with an opening sequence that involves a hapless midwesterner hopping into a airport shuttle and an underlying theme that plays on the legend by exploring whether or not all marriages could involve unsuspecting men being lured out of their comfort zones until they metaphorically drown never to be heard from by their single friends again. or something like that.
as it turns out m. night shyamalan’s new movie, lady in the water doesn’t have anything to do with the legend of the lady of the lake and, of course, odin’s aunt and new uncle had a perfectly perfect wedding with not a single drowning. but still, i think there’s still a good movie in there somewhere, even if i will have to add a few harrowing details and macguffins before we finally get to The Kiss right just as the closing credits roll.