Last night I texted my friend, Mark DeAlessandro: "I'm watching "The Specialist" and I know that is you jumping off the bridge in the opening scene. What other scenes are you in in the movie?" Five minutes later he called me.
I said, "I'm on the part where the guy has just removed the bomb that was under his car. He is at the exit and the ticket machine is counting down like a bomb..."
To my surprise Mark said, "Oh that's me. That car almost hit me. I was sitting by the curb. They used a so and so machine to catapult me into the air. I'll have to show you one of those sometime. It feels like the air goes WHOOSHH..."
I didn't know what he was talking about because I hadn't gotten to that part of the movie yet. But when I saw it I knew Mark worked with fire and there was a huge fire and a body being WHOOSHED into the air out of the car exploding... was THAT Mark? I rewound it several times and finished the movie. Yes, that was the scene he had described. Here it is.
This is why he is so miraculously special, he just is. He is unbelievable. I knew, of course, about the scene where he jumps from a bridge, it is in his "Texas Tales from a Lone Star" promo of scene clips he's in. But I didn't know it was from the 2nd highest grossing movie of Stallone's career, $174,000,000.
Why did God put me together with Mark as friends? It was totally God.
One day in 2017 my actress girlfriend Gigi, had called me out of the blue and said, "I was just exercising and wasn't thinking about you at all and the Holy Spirit told me, "Take Angel with you tonight to the dinner."
She had and I had gone in to the private dining room at an Austin restaurant, getting there a bit ahead of her. Mark had turned around and said hi. God had done it. But sometimes you don't really grasp how special someone is until much later.
I'm starting to grasp it. Mark was Sylvester Stallone's body double and primary stunt double for 23 years. He just thinks differently than most people. I see it in his faith because we've all three been very close friends now since that day in 2017.
I'm writing his book for him so these short-stories serve two purposes, I've been writing as we live and saving each bit of insight and writing and experience. I think sometimes God has special plans that we just don't grasp but nevertheless we live them and eventually begin to see. The first link (coming soon) has the car bomb scene of Mark being Whooshed into the air, on fire. The second (coming soon) is that most amazing stunt - it takes my breath away - when Sylvester Stallone jumps off the bridge in the opening scene of "The Specialist." That’s actually Mark jumping, Sly’s double. xo Angel
Copyright 2022 Angel Isaacs All Rights Reserved
Written January 21, 2022
