The amount of Oasis content in my Facebook feed is decreasing from its peak at the beginning of the month, probably inevitably, but two pieces of unlicensed merchandise crossed the feed that I thought were worth sharing.
An Oasis baseball jersey! I don’t need it and wouldn’t buy it — I wore the Washington Nationals City Connect Sean Doolittle Oasis jersey I bought off Facebook and wore to the MetLife concert to a Senators game last week — but it does look nice.
One thing about baseball jerseys. They aren’t cut for men with my gut. Like, I’m a little heavy but not excessively so, but jerseys are definitely not made to go over a belly that’s even slightly protruding.
We come to it at last, the quintessential devil in these matters.
Monopoly.
For someone who is not a fan of Monopoly, I have a surprising number of Monopoly sets. I have two Beatles sets! I have a Monty Python Monopoly-esque game. I have a Doctor Who Monopoly that Diamond wasn’t actually supposed to sell in the United States and it somehow slipped through the cracks. (When Winning Edge released Sherlock Monopoly, we were not able to get that. I asked Tom Mitchell, the Games brand manager, and he gave me the whole sordid story.) I have Peanuts and Animaniacs, and I even have a Turkey Hill Monopoly set, which I bought at their gift shop across the Susquehanna in Columbia six years back.
I am not going to be adding an unlicensed Oasis Monopoly to my collection. It won’t ever get played, and it will only take up space.
Did I mention that I do not like Monopoly? Well, I don’t.
And this is a good segue into something else Oasis-related. I received an email recently from a reader offering support after my departure from Diamond, and he also read my posts on Oasismania in New York Labor Day weekend and wanted to suggest a John Lewis Christmas commercial that I might enjoy, one that featured a cover Oasis’s “Half the World Away” by the Norwegian singer, Aurora.
I could remember seeing this ad at the time, and I could remember that I had been quite moved by it, but it had slipped my mind as a ten-year-old ad for a British retailer might.
Watching it again over the weekend, it landed differently.
It’s essentially a live-action version of the framing story of Mark Osborne’s animated adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince. In that film, a bond is formed between an elderly man and a little girl, a bond built on dreams and stories and imagination and love. It is a film that wrecks me every time I watch it. It is a film that wrecked me when I found puzzles based on the film at Ollie’s Bargain Outlet It is a film that can wreck me just to think about it.
It is a film that touched my soul.
I didn’t realize, until my third or fourth viewing, that the old man — the Aviator of Saint-Exupery’s book — dies at the end.
The John Lewis ad hits me in the same way.
I’ve been thinking about this since my encounter with the homeless in Harrisburg on Saturday. We all have a desire to be seen, to have our worth and our dignity recognized and acknowledged. The little girl of the John Lewis ad sees the old man on the moon and seeks to acknowledge him, and through her perseverance she is able able to express her love for him.
The Little Prince reverses this. The old man, the Aviator, sees the Little Girl, and through his perseverance and her curiosity they forge a bond, and she is able to grow and love.
I need to watch that film again. I will be a sobby mess, though.
Except I don’t know where my blu-ray is…