Room With a Theme

 

She had this EXACT full set on her counter, it's vintage now!

When I was a wee lass back in the mid ’70s there seemed to be an obscene number of marginally employed parents milling around poking their noses into the business practices of myself and my friends.

If we were trying to climb the ivy on the side of the house up to the roof some buttinski would inevitably hear the crash of crumbling siding or the screams of a child and come investigate cutting our fun short.

Back then there were different kinds of houses.

There was the house where the parents had obviously been murdered by the children because it was always overrun with local kids and had no adult supervision.

There was the house with the super old parents that never knew what you were talking about if you spoke in code so you could discuss any number of subjects with out them catching on.

Then there was the super involved house where mom and dad were coiled like pit vipers ready to strike during the first behavioral infraction and you had to step carefully for fear of getting jettisoned before the ice cream treats after pool time.

The hardest for me to understand though was the house that was more important than any living thing.

It was the theme house.

Immaculate, with a manicured lawn, its interior filled with the most delightful treasures that you must never touch.

Looking back I’m not sure if it was the drinking or the massive amounts of drugs people were ingesting or the fact that your life was so bleak you needed something to cling  to in order to feed your OCD but this place was a testament to obsessive matching.

I remember the first time I laid eyes on theme ladies kitchen.

It was a vast wonderland of ceramic mushroom containers, mushroom wallpaper, a spice rack that held the small warm colored bottles back with protruding mushroom tops, mushroom placemats in the mushroom pattern upholstered breakfast nook and a mushroom clock.

 There were mushroom potholders and dish towels and even mushroom magnets on her brand new sparkly refrigerator.

I remember coming home from dinner at their house on a summer evening and wondering if I should mention it. Suddenly my dad broke the silence with ” wow, what’s with the mushrooms?”

Then they erupted in laughter and made inappropriate drug references and phallic jokes for the rest of the ride.

This didn’t faze me in the least as I was lost in my own thoughts. I was bewildered by a mindset that would allow that kind of methodic discipline in collecting and displaying knick knacks. Imagine the hunting and scouring you’d have to do at the local shops to amass such a collection?

There could be a room in your house with a theme?

This baffled me as well.

Maybe it was because our kitchen was in a different building altogether than the rest of our house with no heat or perhaps it was its resemblance to the kill room that Leather face emerged from with his roaring chainsaw in TCM but why would you bother?

Worse, what would you do if you tired of the theme?

Where would all the brik a brak and ceramic masterpieces go?

I found out the answer to that question four years later when Mushroom lady came to brunch and announced that she was changing gears. Now owls would be her focal point and if we came across anything owl related could we please let her know?

The next time she had us for dinner I was unable to shake the feeling that I was being watched everywhere I went due to the several thousand sets of  eyes peering at us from the kitchen. If you are going to have a theme I’d say “birds of prey” should be off the table.

The photo of the VINTAGE ’70s mushroom cannister above is FOR SALE! Get your theme room started TODAY!

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.