I’m teaching contemporary literature this quarter at Milwaukee School of Engineering, and the text we’re discussing this coming week is literally hot off the presses—”The Flick,” which is the play that won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama last spring and which just came out in book format about a month ago.

Anyway, as I was paging through the play tonight to prep for tomorrow’s class, I reread a section where one of the characters, who is a major film lover, discovers in a dream that his favorite movie was not a classic or anything by Truffaut or Tarantino but was, instead, Honeymoon in Vegas.  Not knowing much about this film, I went straight to Wikipedia to see if I could figure out how its plot relates to the play.

I quickly got sidetracked when I glanced through the cast list and saw a familiar name: Bruno Mars.  What?

First of all, just in case you don’t know who Bruno Mars is, here is his spectacular Super Bowl halftime performance from last winter.

So back to Honeymoon in Vegas.  How could Bruno Mars have been in that film?  It came out in 1992.  Mars was born in 1985, which would have made him seven in 1992 and even younger when the movie was shot.

Well, Mars turned out to be one of the film’s many Elvis impersonators.  Take a look at his adorable “Little Elvis” scene below.

The first time I ever saw Mars perform was at the Grammy Awards show in February 2012.  Electrifying!  And I marveled that someone could be so very polished and accomplished at such a young age.

Little did I realize:  Mars had already been practicing his craft for over twenty years!