That's a wrap

Celebrating a Deathday™: The station house lost one of its own September 6, 2108 with the passing of Santa Luisa, California homicide detective Dan August. The handsome, plainly-clothed August was barely out of his 20s when he famously caught the eye of a Hollywood casting agent who took August from his patrol car and planted him behind the wheel of an Olympia® beer-hauling, 18-wheel truck for his star-turning role as Burt "Bandit" Reynolds in “Smokey Joe and the Bandit.” When the devilish, moustachioed bandito blithely outran former bus driver-turned lawless southern sheriff Ralph "Smokey Joe" Kramden, audiences — and honourable police officials — cheered. Smokey Joe was a shameful excuse for a lawman and his pencil thin moustache didn’t hold a candle to Bandit's fulsome crumb-catcher. I have it on some authority — or possibly, invention — that one night on production, August — having grown weary of Kramden's "to the moon" histrionics — eyed a box of Reynolds Wrap® aluminium foil at a Kraft™ service table and tossed it in the direction of his heavysweat-stained screen nemesis, uttering the now familiar phrase, "That's a wrap." The bell-bottomed actor then cackled and sauntered back to his trailer, signaling the end of the shooting day. The wily August would become a popular, wise-cracking, bow-and-arrow-firing everyman with a cocked eye — and cock-holstered velvetine trousers — for women of all persuasion, squiring elder talk show Hostess Twinkies®, bleach blonde Cincinnati radio station receptionists and the bloody Flying Nun® herself. In later years, the birthday-suited machismo man took to the center spread eagle in Metropolitan magazine before turning to film direction, lensing long-shlong performances from Dierks Diggler, at the behest of Dom DeLuise. In the end, we remember Dan August with fondness as a simple 70s patrolman who did his noble best amongst fringe-jacketed long hairs. Happy Anni-hearse-ary, Citizen Augustan.