an scene

By coincidence, one of my guilty sonic pleasures came through my headphones right after I read a post to this challenge. I will never use the song’s inspired, inchoate lyrics in my own writing, but in case someone else skimming Prose likes them too, allow me to refer you to the ridiculously-titled Lady Gaga track “Highway Unicorn (Road to Love).” And before you laugh too hard, check out the opening lines:

Run, run with her top down, baby, she flies

Run, run with the fury of a saint in her eyes

Run, run, cha, cha, cha, baby, she goes

With blond hair and a gun smoking under her toes

Moving into the chorus, the lyrics include “Ride, ride pony ride ride,” and “Ride, ride pony tonight,” which seems a clear reference to a Ford Mustang. And that, dear reader, is a hell of a setup.

Whom or what did she shoot? I don’t know. Why does the song later say “She’s just an American riding a dream” and that she has “a flag in her bra”? I don’t know. What the hell does a unicorn have to do with any of it? I don’t know! It makes little sense, really, and the peak of the chorus sounds like a desperate attempt to wrench a few more soaring notes onto an album that already had “Born This Way” and “You and I.”

But in my mind’s eye, Horatio, I play the music video that never was, and an establishing shot of a desert highway at night gradually zooms in while tracking an impossibly red Mustang, its headlights blazing along the dotted lines. The driver’s blond hair whips wildly as she blows past a speed limit sign, but the camera continues zooming all the way to the pedals and a very-Tarantino shot of her sandaled and pedicured feet, the end of a shotgun’s smoking barrel visible along the floorboards.

This is probably of no use whatsoever to your project (which I’m afraid I do not have time to participate in – I’m actually shirking a stack of grading right now to type this). But to see a series of posts of people batting about ideas, just as Gaga paints the picture of that Mustang in my ears? Fate, clearly.

Have at ye, Prosers. (If anyone ever actually uses this setup, please tag me :)