Thespian John Cusack, last seen in this space accused of baseball bisexuality by Ben Schwartz, recalls Chicago’s demolition of New England  in Super Bowl XX  (“the Bears were a wondrous team in ’85/’86: full of great personalities, before any  originality in sports was reduced to the common rubble of brand”) while describing the event’s halftime show in Tuesday’s edition of Boing Boing :

I remember witnessing the UP WITH PEOPLE halftime pageant terrified, with dilated pupils. It was a time when kids were ordered or bullied into attending high school pep rallies”with all that hateful homecoming gibberish.

As you can see in this video now, watching the performance was like diving into an ocean of bad fashion and forced smiles. Dr. Pepper dancing and Mom Jeans from shore to shore… pre-Prozac in motion…. military ballet… Mandatory cheers and quasi-religious cult patriotics… the glory of the empire. A choreographed tribute to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King. A celebration of diversity, unity, and fluorescent leggings.

The idea that America would one day feel homesick for the ’80s was as alien to me then as that vast, choreographed grid of grinning dancers, goose-stepping to synthesizer blasts.

The three grams of psilocybin I gobbled before the game was the only thing that kept me sane.

Sound familiar?  Well, it oughta.  As New York Magazine’s Edith Zimmerman mentioned last week, Cusack’s been regurgitating his Super-Bowl-On-Drugs story time and time again while doing publicity for the megaplex smash, “Hot Tub Time Machine”  Zimmerman found no fewer prior instances recently where Cusack directly or indirectly mentioned the game in question, Up With People’s performance and his own altered state at the time.