I decided to move this section from the Dopo La Grande Notte illustration ( [link] ) to this journal section because it was getting too cluttered there. It's the back-story to this illustration.



Here's What Happened:
In a world where time is non-linear and where unbelievable coincidences occur frequently...

Primo (from Big Night) & Freddy Riedenschneider (from The Man Who Wasn't There)
Freddy walked into Paradise by chance not long after the Big Night went down while working in New Jersey. With his refined palette he immediately acknowledged that the food here is absolutely amazing and partnered up with Primo without hesitation. Primo cooks and creates with Ann by his side (left painting on wall), while Freddy provided new capital, and legal-financial advice. He keeps practicing law and advertises heavily every time he flies around the country representing new clients. He doesn't interfere with Primo's genius and lets him work his magic the way he wants. This leads Primo to discover and try new recipes never imagined before while still keeping the basic traditions. Freddy comes in every week to check up on things, have a meal and listen to some good music. Secondo, realising the importance of his brother's principles and philosophies, stayed on with him, and together with Cristiano, is now running the second store in Los Angeles (right painting on wall). They follow Primo's culinary visions loyally.

Ben Geisler (fron Barton Fink), Mikhail Andreyevich Vilyenkov (from Paulie), & Adrian Monk (from Monk)
Ben is now into book publishing after leaving Hollywood. Misha moved with Marie to Jersey - back to the same neighbourhood where she met Paulie. The two are meeting to discuss another publishing deal for Misha's next book - Dissecting Dostoyevsky. Paulie decided to tag along with Misha by sneaking into his bag, but unable to stand being cooped up for long, he flies out of the bag across the store and lands on Andrian's head. With Trudy's case solved and now reinstated, Adrian has just finished giving a series of lectures about his methods in detective work at a police conference, and is at Paradise waiting to meet up with Natalie who just arrived to witness the scene (in far BG). Adrian has gotten a bit better with handshakes but potential avian flu vectors is a different story. Ben tries to calm Adrian down but just makes it worse.... He probably shouldn't have told him not to worry that swine flu is more widespread as of late...

Faruq "Frank" Haddad (from The Siege), & Tech Sergeant Chen (from Galaxy Quest)
Chen, recently taking on the additional role of liaison officer for Thermia-Earth relations, is scouting for new crew members and locates Faruq from the ship's sensors. He makes contact by directly transporting down to Faruq's location where he was just coming out of a conference centre with Adrian. Knowing the restaurant's remarkable reputation from the files in the ship's database, Chen takes them into Paradise for dinner and chat and is trying to persuade Faruq to join for his exceptional marksmanship, intel, and field expertise by wowing him with gadgetry. He's buying into it from the looks of it. Space travel and futuristic technology beats the crap out of FBI and microwave thermal imaging devices. Chen intends to get to Adrian and his incredible deductive reasoning and observation skills later by promoting the ship's sterile environment and state-of-the-art cleaning supplies.

Kevin Conway (from A Civil Action) & The German (from Gattaca)
These two rediscovered their musical abilities they had from their youth. Kevin was traveling after the firm fell apart, and The German had changed his name to Heinrich Spielmann and was fleeing from the authorities for being busted for selling genetic profiles, when they met by chance at Paradise. The place only had an upright piano at the time as they started improvising together while Primo was closing up that night. The jam session was a success as their skills complemented each other. It became a regular occurrence for them to stop by late to jam. Slowly the other customers started to stay after their late night meals to listen to the two until everyone started doing this and made it hard for Primo to close up. So they became a regular show for earlier in the evenings. Their wide repertoire includes Italian canzones, German lieders, jazz, crazy classical-based piano duets and medleys which they arrange themselves, and some musical comedy similar in spirit to Victor Børge.
***

I love all these characters, the accents, their sympathetic nature (for most), their unique personalities, everything. Most are kind educated hard-working souls that got screwed over by some higher power and have to overcome it, and I wanted to depict them as being successful and happy because I thought that's what they all deserved after their struggles (I know it doesn't look like that for Mr. Monk in this particular moment but if you've read the back-story just now, you know that I've envisioned the rest of his life to be happy after the series ends). I wanted to include more characters but space was becoming an issue. I didn't want it to look too cluttered that that identities got confusing, or too crowded for any good posing to show through. And I wanted to include more main course-ish dishes (actually seriously wanted to paint in a Timpano for the sake of honouring Big Night) but thought it would be weird if they had already started eating when Mr. Monk is waiting for Natalie to get there (well, she just arrived) so I just left it with a platter of antipasto (Italian version of hors d'oeuvre). Also I know that the last two guys are a bit out of character but I kinda wanted to incorporate a musical element to this piece because I knew that Mr. Shalhoub does indeed play piano and he was a good singer in some of the scene in Monk where he's singing show tunes.


Thanks for reading and viewing.

Riè Shibazaki