WLBOTT On the Silver Screen

WLBOTT Visits Ouarzazate

Our youngest Elder, Elder DZ, is in a predicament. His student housing lease ends on the 15^th of August, and the next lease, in a different apartment, doesn’t begin until September 1^st. So he has to lug out all his stuff and find a place to stay for two weeks. But he’s in Santa Barbara, one of the most expensive cities in the world.

It’s not all roses (as pictured above) in the UCSB neighborhood.

As more California residents flee major metropolitan areas for other parts of the state, small cities are having a moment. But even small cities have their struggles, most notably their tendency to become increasingly less affordable when that was once one of their main draws. In a recent WalletHub analysis, the personal finance company ranked towns with populations between 25,000 and 100,000 across the country, and California’s didn’t fare well.

Isla Vista, just north of Santa Barbara and home to UC Santa Barbara, ranked last on the list of 1,318 small cities. It had some of the worst affordability and economic health scores of all the cities ranked, with a high percentage of the population in poverty and one of the lowest homeowner rates.

SFGate.com

It turns out, as revealed in the prophecies, that it is much cheaper to fly to Ouarzazate, Morocco and stay in a luxury hotel that to spend the two weeks in Santa Barbara.

Booked!

Miracle of the Sand and Salt

Elder DZ phoned in his travel plans to WLBOTT HQ, and was lamenting his anticipated loneliness to Sister Magdalena. Two weeks alone in the desert, in the style of the Early Fathers, had initially sounded appealing, but the quite was closing in on him.

But then Sister Magdalena recalled an article in the recent WLBOTT internal newsletter (Get Back To Work!), where our film critic, Clementine DuCinema was proposing a film set in the Sahara dunes.

The pitch meeting went well.

Creative Differences

We don’t want to give the wrong impression; this was not a linear process with a general consensus. There were many spirited debates, and a lot of rejected concepts.

This concept was firmly rejected by the WLBOTT Ministry of Virtue and Vice and Sister Magdalena:

The Plot – Miracle of the Sand and Salt

In a nutshell, an elderly Moroccan couple, living under the glare of the concentrated solar tower of the Ouarzazate energy facility, have run out of salt to preserve their olive harvest. There is no salt to be found, at any price, because of the scarcity created by the needs of the solar facility.

Sister Magdalena plays Sister Magdalena, a wandering and somewhat irritable desert monastic who is contacted by the local imam, who asks her to join in the communal prayer for salt.

The imam relates an ancient local legend: When the moon casts the shadow of the camel upon the Dune of Seven Winds, the sand shall become salt.

Nobody believes this, except Elder DZ (played by Elder DZ), an itinerant scholar who has spent fourteen years translating the prophecy and has recently begun to suspect that he mistranslated salt and it actually says flugelhorn. The legend appeared shortly after a roving band of itinerant yodelers passed through the desert, so the timing has always been a bit suspicious.

The community gathers in pray, after which Sister Magdalena climbs atop a sand dune at sunset to meditate on the mysteries of life. A beautiful full moon rises, and a mysterious shadow of a camel appears on a majestic sand dune.

Sister Magdalena, Elder DZ, and the amazed villagers run to the dune and begin madly digging through the sand, only to discover the discarded instruments of the 19th century yodelers – including three flugelhorns, two accordions, a tuba, decorative beer steins, and several pairs of lederhosen.

As disappointment begins to engulf the crowd, they see a camel caravan loaded with salt, figs, frankincense, and oddly, replacement automobile transmissions.