Blowing the Lid Off of the 30 Year Old Conspiracy

My cousins are actually in this picture. Salt in my wounds. I should have been there!!

I wish our parents had liked us a little more and bothered to document our childhood hijinks  carefully instead of sending us out into the wild to forage for berries and fend for ourselves.  

Because  if they had I would be able to show you hours of priceless film footage of my cousins and I playing various games of King Kong vs. Godzilla or Rodan vs. Son of Kong with a final round of Mighty Joe Young saving the orphans from the burning building before riding Mothra off into the sunset.

In reality no such footage exists  because they were too busy drinking pitchers of iced tea  and smoking cigarettes in the backyard stopping only long enough to scream around the front of the house for us to be quiet because they were working on their tans. Well, everyone except my Grandma who was nursing a Dewar’s and water and wearing a sensible sun hat.
The only variation on  this monster vs. monster theme that I can recall are a number of staged boxing  bouts at our grandmothers house between pretend Frasier, Foreman and Ali (it WAS the 70′s you know?) where we talked smack about floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee and playfully punched each other in the face with hands covered in multiple layers of stolen sweatsocks.

This game never turned out well since it required sneaking down a long easy to see hallway and always resulted in a real fight about who was going to be Muhammad Ali.

But again, I digress…..

Today  we are here to use our junior detective skills to unravel a painful 30-year-old mystery shrouded in sad silence.

On November 10th super mega producer Dino De Laurentis passed away causing a wave of pent-up nostalgia to wash over me and opening the lid on the  chest of unrealized dreams I keep under my bed.

So I  called my mom to get the truth on what we in my family call the twin tower king kong midnight run episode  that I “missed” where my cousins got to make an undercover of the night trip to the city to watch the  Dino de Laurentis produced movie KING KONG film the last scene of this not quite so seminal remake .

You may remember this as the blockbuster that launched the early breathy career of one Jessica Lange and her equally shagtastic and bearded suitor Jeff Bridges. Others recall scratching their heads and wondering if a careless typo had resulted in her characters  name being DWAN instead of DAWN.

I remember it as the biggest missed opportunity of my childhood.

To this day when I watch the final frames of the movie where the gathered crowd moves forward to encircle the now dead Kong- lying lifeless on the pavement at the foot of the world trade center-  I become consumed with regret because I SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE.

This was going to be my pinnacle moment. For weeks it was all my cousin and I could talk about. His parents (my aunt and uncle) were going to shepard us down the Palisades parkway and over the GW bridge to a magical place where Hollywood would be transporting us directly into the monster movie of my dreams.

There was a call for extras to shoot a scene in the dead of night in NYC and we had plans to mix in with that crowd and insert ourselves directly into the Kong fantasy we’d been dreaming about all those years.

And then the big day came. My mom suggested I go to sleep for a while before they came to pick me up and then the next thing I know?

It’s morning.

I missed it.
The tears of agony. The wailing. The disappointment!

WHY? I cried into my Count Chocula the next morning . I was inconsolable.

As far as I’m concerned there is no reason good enough to have taken that from me , hence the anti-climactic phone call to my mother.

Me: Mom, what really happened that time you didn’t wake me up to go see the filming of that King Kong scene in the city?

Mom: Oh I had no intention of letting you go, so I let you fall asleep and pretended that we couldn’t wake you up.

Me: That’s horrible! I wanted to see that more than anything else in the whole world!

Mom: You were six and a half years old and I had NO intention of sending you into the city for a 3am extras call.

Me: So everyone knew but me?

Mom: Yes.

Me: You are a monster.

Mom: Yup.

So there you have it folks. Small child with dream of touching childhood monster hero foiled by entire family conspiring against her.

Mystery solved.

I Like My Fear Like I Like My Men. Burning HOT.

Yeah fear faucet, if only it were that easy.

If you were to look at me from a reasonable distance you would never imagine that under my cool seemingly unflappable exterior lies a geyser of festering terror just below the surface.

It is the result of trying to live my life without the comfort of the pretend safety net provided for me by my mother who is like a cross between a Woody Allen maternal movie caricature and a Sicilian death squad.

It took years of talking myself through situations that I was determined to conquer but had been taught to dutifully avoid like flying in an airplane and swimming in the Pacific (most shark attacks happen in three feet of water or less you know!) before I could stop white knuckling it while going through the motions and have an authentically joyful experience.

 Whether it was an ominous foreboding hunch or a mildly threatening prediction, mom always had you thinking the worst could happen, and if it did, it would be happening directly to you.

It was this type of contrary news , delivered with the zealous fervor of an unhinged televangelist, that got me thinking.

When faced with the proof that negativity rots the soul, I realized this was clearly a problem, as I had specialized in second generation negativity since the 80′s thanks to mom.

That, and I could effectively live a life where NOTHING at all happened inside a safe room thereby giving the woman who birthed me exactly what she wanted OR I could go enjoy myself at the risk of being taken hostage by angry pirates next time I was on a boat.

So I took a mental inventory of things I’ve done that gave me pause, but I did anyway.

Took a hot air balloon ride past Pikes Peak in Colorado.

Rode horses through Garden of the Gods.

Attended hundreds of rock concerts in questionable attire with varied and interesting people.

Married a guy who could grow a beard.

Traveled far and wide in planes, trains and automobiles.

Had three kids.

Jumped off a cliff (into water)

Drove a boat and a jet ski.

Used a public toilet in Mexico. It was an emergency, don’t judge me.

Okay, the longer I sat and thought about this the bigger the list got and I started to sound completely reckless and foolhardy so I cut it short. You get the basic idea though.

These days the old battle-ax drops her fear pellets around the fringes where they can still be found but are harder to detect.

Usually they come by email and have a simple subject line like “SEE!” or “Watch the kids to make sure they don’t have these symptoms!” followed by an attachment from CNN breaking news.

I’ve been warned about the following.

Bankruptcy and foreclosure for the non frugal.

Venereal Disease for the promiscuous.

Splinters for those who run on hardwoods with bare feet.

Plane crashes for those that fly in the winter (they aren’t de-icing those wings for nothing you know)

And of course a head injury for the careless or those without a helmet.

These days I just laugh and hit the delete button but sometimes I still find myself checking to see if anyone in my house has that weird looking rash she emailed me about the other day.