Obstructed View of Rocky
AMONG THE THOUSANDS who crammed into the green leafy area on the north side of the front steps of the Art Museum Friday evening, dodging rush hour traffic to see and hear Sylvester Stallone speak at the unveiling of the Rocky statue, I must have heard five foreign langages spoken by those who eagerly sought to get a glimpse.
I heard Chinese, I heard German, I heard what could have been Serb or Croatian, I heard Philipino and I heard a language spoken by a beautiful blonde woman that didn't need translation.
I'm not saying that Philadelphia isn't a cosmopolitan city, but in my lifetime of walking its streets, I've never heard so many different foreign languages in such a short time. They were Rocky fans. And for the first time I realized in a personal way that Rocky belongs to the world, not just Philadelphia.
And in any language, the chant is the same -- Roc-KY! Rah-KEE! Wa-QI! Ya-CHEE!
During the unveiling ceremony Sylvester Stallone told a good story I've never heard before about the famous Art Museum steps scene in the original Rocky. You gotta remember that Rocky was a low budget film. They made up a lot of stuff on the fly. As Stallone told it, he and his director picked the Art Museum steps as a location to show Rocky's gathering strength. "Originally we had no idea of running up the steps, but I said, 'Rocky's got to do something,' we're in Philadelphia, we're driving around in a van trying to do something interesting and I saw those steps and I said, this is incredible. This is what Rocky should do. To show how strong he is he should pick up (Stallone's real dog, Butkis) his 130 pound bull mastiff in his arms and run up the steps."
"So I picked up the dog. He groaned, I groaned. My back groaned. And I got up about a flight and a half and I stumbled to my knees. It looked kind of weird since the dog is slightly smaller than a dinosaur, it didn't make a cool visual .If he had been a Siamese cat, or a parrot, something would have been OK, a mouse. But this thing was like carrying, I don't know, a U-Haul.
"So, I put him down, and I said, we better do this quickly because if the police see us they're going to stop us and that will be the end of the movie. So they say, 'OK, just run up the steps alone.' So I run up the steps alone, and I did that turn, and I looked out on to the city, and. . .my life has never been the same. since.
"So, thank you all. Yo! Philly. I love you forever."
