Boogaloo Score

If you're going to repeat yourself, you better have a good reason for it.

Although I had already seen the movie "Chef," an opportunity to see it with a chef was too appetizing to pass up.

Of course, no one's going to be more critical of a film than someone who actually does the work depicted, but even he had to admit that the soundtrack was pretty terrific.

My fellow popcorn eater might have been relating more to the on-screen food and restaurant issues, but I was all about the music. Sitting in my spacious seat at Movieland, my legs draped across the railing in front of me, I found myself bopping in my seat throughout, unable to ignore the pervasive rhythms of the movie's score.

It wasn't that I wasn't paying attention to the story, it's just that songs like Pete Rodriguez's "I Like It Like That," sounded like a Puerto-Rican boogaloo instant party-starter that made me wish I could samba.

Plus there's all that Cuban music, aka dance music, and song after song not only made me happy to hear, but also got me thinking about the soundtrack to my life.

Perhaps not surprisingly, that's not a new consideration for me.

There have been many times when I've been doing something, say driving down a country road at 45 mph, and a song comes on, something like the Bo Deans' "Forever on My Mind" and I can feel in my bones that if my life were a movie, this is the perfect song for the scene of me cruising along a tree-lined road deep in thought.

For the scene in my lifetime movie where I'm walking up to a door to enter a party, I've always thought that the song that should be playing in the background as the door is opened to me is Joan Armatrading's "Kind Words (and a Real Good Heart)," with the camera following me as I make my way through the hallways and rooms of people.

And there will be dance music, lots of hip-shaking music to represent how dancing is something I have enjoyed since I can remember.

Oh, yes, there will be Motown, and disco and all those new wave bands I danced to in sweaty D.C. clubs during the '80s (if I danced to Modern English's "I Melt with You" once, I danced to it a thousand times).

I see Madonna's "Into the Groove" playing during a scene after I moved to Richmond, figured out what I wanted and was trying to establish my happy place, a goal I not only reached but maintained.

But somewhere in the past ten years or so, I got exposed to a much wider range of music, all foreign and all speaking to me in one way or another, so I can imagine scenes of a busy evening in my life now set to Bollywood, Latin, even African music.

The soundtrack to my life might be more fascinating than the whole story itself. I like it like that.