“In such bad shape,” Jackie muttered as he walked to into his room. “I spend only two weeks in America and get so lazy,” he said to me. It didn’t click at the time but I found out later that Jackie always does some form of exercise every day! Sometimes it’ll be an hour on the elliptical machine after a full twelve to sixteen hour day of shooting and sometimes it’ll be going ten rounds of pads with his stunt guys!
Back to the tape. Now I should’ve cued it to the actual show, especially with all the time I had in the morning, but stupid me, I was caught up in all the hype and forgot to. Anyway, I had all of the rehearsals for the show I did in addition to the show itself. It was the biggest show I’d ever done and it was a live theatre presentation for my entire Chinese school for Chinese New Year’s Festival. I wrote the script and choreographed a whole ten minute scene!! I was seventeen at the time. The scene started out with a guy getting robbed and beat up by a bunch of thugs. The guy hobbled to a kung fu master who turned him down at first, but he begged him to learn. The master admired his perseverance and accepted him as a student. A comical training montage followed. Finally after years of training the student had learned all he could and the master sent him off. Can you guess what happened next? The guy ran into the thugs again! No surprise there! And of course a large battle ensued and good triumphed over evil. Yes I realize that that is the most original story you’ve ever heard, but I was seventeen and this was the late nineties – traditional kung fu master student stories were still cool!
Jackie and his crew watched in good humor and even watched some of the rehearsals. I remember them exclaiming, “Oh!” for a scene where three guys came and pushed me to the ground – not that it was a hard fall or anything, but I guess they found it amusing. Anyhow we fast forwarded to the main show and they watched in silence – I doubt they were impressed, I mean as proud as I was of the performance it was still nowhere near what Jackie could do! (on a side note I actually watched the show again recently and considered putting up online, but it was just so unbelievably bad I would be kicked off of the internet for it stinking so much!)
“Very good!” Willie explained gleefully. “So can you come to dinner later tonight and we can talk more?”
“Yes, of course!” I exclaimed! Barely able to believe that I not only just had lunch, but was going to have dinner the Jackie Chan and his crew too!!
“Where are you going now? Do you have anything important?”
I mentioned that I did have a family BBQ that I was suppose to go to but if they wanted me to stay I would’ve!
“It’s okay, go to your family, I’m sure you have lots to tell them! We will call you later with the details,”
“Okay, thank you!” I shook everyone’s hand goodbye, coming to Jackie’s hand last.
“See you later,” was all he said.
Master Chang drove me home and I rushed over to my uncle’s house where the BBQ was to tell everyone what had happened! They didn’t believe me at first, but once they heard how it all happened they were in shock themselves!
“…and not only that, I’m waiting for a call from them and tonight I’ll be having dinner with JACKIE CHAN!!!”
Read On! Chapter 4: The Opportunity of a Lifetime!
