And the boss don't mind sometimes if you act a fool

A woman in Syracuse, New York, spent three days in a hospital after her dentist broke a drill bit in her skull while dancing to the theme from Car Wash.

Needless to say, litigation ensued.

As patient Brandy Fanning was undergoing preparation for an emergency tooth extraction at the Syracuse Community Health Center, the dentist — Dr. George Trusty — got his Rose Royce groove on. According to Fanning's lawsuit, Dr. Trusty "performed rhythmical steps and movements to the song 'Car Wash.'"

The boogie-down continued until Dr. Trusty (who, at least on this occasion, was not) snapped off the tip of his drill into the roof of Fanning's mouth. Trusty's efforts to extract the drill bit with a metal hook only succeeded in jamming the bit deeply into the sinuses behind Fanning's left eye socket. Emergency surgery saved the eye, but the patient continues to suffer "facial swelling, nerve damage and chronic infections," according to the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, in the afterlife, Richard Pryor is laughing his head off over this.

Car Wash is one of those "traffic light" movies for me. I've seen it dozens of times, but anytime I'm surfing the tube late at night and it's playing on some cable channel, I can't help but stop and watch, at least for a few minutes.

Although the music and styles in director Michael Schultz's now 30-year-old flick show the ravages of time, the many humorous moments remain as funny as ever, with the cast of colorful characters still engaging:

• T.C. (stand-up comic Franklyn Ajaye), the lovestruck dreamer with the humongous Afro who imagines himself a superhero called The Fly...
  
  
• Lonnie (former Hogan's Heroes costar Ivan Dixon), the senior employee struggling to rebuild his life after a criminal past...
  
  
• Duane — pardon me... Abdullah (actor-director Bill Duke), the angry Muslim who attracts constant ridicule from his less-serious coworkers ("Say, brother... is ribs pig?")...
  
  
• Lindy (Antonio Fargas, mack daddy Huggy Bear on Starsky and Hutch), the flaming gay stereotype...
  
  
• Floyd and Lloyd (Darrow Igus of the '80s sketch comedy show Fridays, and Dewayne Jessie, the unforgettable Otis Day in National Lampoon's Animal House), who imagine themselves the second coming of the Temptations — despite the fact that they are undermanned and undertalented...
  
  
• Marsha (Melanie Mayron, who went on to a successful career as a director), the lonely cashier who's having an uninspiring affair with the car wash's married owner (character actor Sully Boyar)...
  
  
• The cabbie (comedy legend George Carlin, added to the cast to give the film more name recognition), who wanders through the movie looking for the "tall, black, blonde hooker" (Lauren Jones) who skipped out on a fare...
  
  
• Dueling pranksters Goody (Henry Kingi, founder of the Black Stuntmen's Association and one-time husband of Bionic Woman Lindsay Wagner) and Chuco (Pepe Serna, sidekick Reno Nevada in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai)...
  
  
• ...and of course, money-grubbing televangelist Daddy Rich (Pryor, who later admitted that he was coked out of his gourd while filming his only scene) and his backup singers, the Wilson Sisters (the real-life Pointer Sisters).

Who'd ever guess that this hip urban screenplay was written by the terminally Caucasian Joel Schumacher, who went on to direct such varied films as the classic horror spoof The Lost Boys, the biopic thriller Veronica Guerin, the Vietnam War drama Tigerland, and the screen version of The Phantom of the Opera — as well as such abysmal dreck as 8MM, Bad Company, Phone Booth, and the synapse-dulling Batman & Robin?

Brandy Fanning probably thinks that Dr. Trusty is a refugee from a film Schumacher had nothing to do with: Marathon Man.