REELING IN THE YEARS:
CHAPTER TWO EXCERPTS
Two weeks ago I posted a few passages from the first chapter of my memoir-in-progress. Each chapter touches on a major life experience and the movie (or movies) that influenced me at the time of those events. While the first chapter focused on a genuine cinema classic (The Wizard of Oz), chapter two moves us into true celluloid trash territory with a nostalgic look back at Smokey and the Bandit Part 3:
SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT PART 3
I never wanted to see Smokey and the Bandit Part 3. Thank Christ, I never had to.
My near collision with the car chase caper came in 1982, the year I turned eight and my parents took a two-week trip to England without my older sister, Patty, and me. Their vacation threatened to end my family as I knew it. I felt it in my bones. Their plane would take a nosedive into the icy Atlantic. Or, even worse, my folks would abandon us and become Princess Diana groupies. I got this notion from my mother, who slapped her paws on any magazine with big beaked Di on the cover.
“Don’t worry,” my mother assured me. “Papa will take care of you.”
My mother’s father was known as Tom in most circles. But to his three grandkids – my cousin, Jaimie, my sister and me– he was Papa, a boisterous, balding, blubbery kisser who reportedly excelled at golf.
If the Three Stooges ever needed an alternate, They could have called Papa. He often fell asleep while reading the newspaper, waking up with splotches of ink on his face. He messily gobbled down sandwiches, howling when, on more than one occasion, his teeth fillings connected with pieces of aluminum foil that he’d neglected to peel off his sandwich meat. If he spilled scalding coffee in your lap, he’d make it up to you by tossing a wet paper towel on your crotch and muttering so many apologies that you’d forgive him just to get him to shut up.
Papa, to quote Ralph Nadar, was unsafe at any speed. But his no holds barred affection – not to mention the way he spoiled us with cash handouts and neon green glow sticks on the Fourth of July – left us grandkids with no other inclination than to worship him like a cult leader. He laughed loudly, frequently, and infectiously, a walking anti-depressant.
Still, his bottomless enthusiasm for a dumb joke could be annoying. On one of his visits to Connecticut, when I was four, Papa saw me standing naked at the top of the stairs. For years to come he found ways to tell strangers that he caught me wearing my birthday suit.
Ever since my grandmother, Nana, died in 1979, Papa dwelled alone in his big brown house on Park Street in Easthampton, Massachusetts. Easthampton is a working-class town, a regular Hicksville compared to nearby Northampton, home of Smith College, New Age bookshops and infinitesimal lesbians.
Easthampton may have been Northampton’s ugly stepsister, but it had a carnivalesque charm all its own. Oddball businesses lined Main Street, like a combination bakery & laundromat and a dilapidated X-rated movie theater that played Kinky Ladies and other “art house” favorites.
Spring break arrived in April. As our parents fled the country, Papa picked up me and my sister Patty in Connecticut. Per usual, he wore plaid pants and an Izod golf shirt. “I planned a fun time for you two!” he said, rattling off activities with the urgency of an auctioneer. I guess he knew that if he spoke any slower Patty and I would figure out that his proposals were pretty shitty. There was not much fun to be had, after all, at my elderly Aunt Vicki’s house. More than a little bit demented, she wriggled like a lightening victim and pooped in a portable toilet. When it was time to leave her place, she’d slap me hard on the hand and say the words “Last tag!” with an unnerving cackle.
He had some rotten eggs up his sleeve, but Papa obviously hoped to cover up the blemishes and create the illusion that the time of our lives awaited Patty and me.
“We’ll go to Mountain Park,” he promised. “You can ride the kiddy coaster. I’ll even take you on the ski lifts and buy you cotton candy if you’re lucky.”
He scored some big points there, since I was too young to distinguish Mountain Park, a threadbare amusement center in Holyoke, Mass., from Disneyland.
Back at Papa’s big brown house, we’d have complete access to his freezer, which overflowed with pints of Haagan Dazs. And we could raid his moldy refrigerator, where pop cans, not broccoli, inhabited the vegetable crisper.
The candy drawer was the kitchen’s next best feature. Located next to the oven where Papa once left a piece of leathery kielbasa for a whole year (he didn’t cook much) this drawer sheltered M&Ms and shrink-wrapped party packs of king sized candy bars.
Sugar binges at Papa’s led to lots of teeth fillings and humiliating jabs from my dentist (“Do you brush your teeth with Tootsie Pops?”) But the looming threat of preadolescent dentures never thwarted my candy cravings. I’d gum my mother’s desiccated pork chops if need be.
Patty and I said goodbye to my parents, hopped into the backseat of Papa’s sedan and resigned ourselves to two weeks’ exile in Easthampton. I calmed my nerves by letting a simple, reassuring fact sink into my brain: If things got really bad, I could always eat my way into a sugar coma.
Papa seemed to think that I, being young and apprehensive, needed extra incentives. Like a magician pulling a rabbit from a cap, he gave a bright-eyed smile, chuckled and told me that, one lucky afternoon, he would take me to the Hampshire Mall movie theater to see Smokey and the Bandit Part 3.
Even at nine– and even though I hadn’t seen the first two installments in the Bandit franchise - I recognized this upcoming cultural outing as bad news. My parents had already introduced me to vintage comedies like Woody Allen’s Sleeper and Peter Sellers’ A Shot in the Dark, and I really loved them. No spoof starring Burt Reynolds and a dead fish strapped to the top of a car could possibly compare.
Mind you, it was a good ten years before I feasted my eyes on Mr. Reynolds’ famous nude spread for Cosmopolitan magazine. Maybe I would have been more revved up to see the movie if I had a mental picture of Burt’s strangely alluring, hair-upholstered body.
I would have put the grueling melodrama of Sophie’s Choice on top of old Smokey any day. But Papa had been planning this surprise for a long time, and he counted on me to shit my pants when I heard it. So I pretended to be excited, figuring that, depressing as it sounds, two hours of tedium might be the high point in a highly unpromising Spring Break.
Even though I managed to dodge the Smokey and the Bandit bullet during the first week of the visit, Spring Break started off with a definite thud. Problem #1: There was nothing to do. Jaimie, an older cousin who doubled as a beguiling cabaret act, was stuck in school, so we had to stick it out until the weekend to see her.
Problem #2: Oldsters abounded. Papa deposited us with one of our elderly, sofa-bound relatives while he went to work. Aunt Gen sat in a recliner watching painting instruction shows on PBS. Her deviled egg-filled refrigerator and her decorative trays of stale licorice hardly piqued our interest.
Our jolly and generous Uncle Frank, a recovering alcoholic who leafed through issues of Playboy when he took us “shopping,” fed us kielbasa and queasily aromatic turnip casseroles. At least my Aunt Antone’s house was an amusement park. She lived upstairs from the funeral parlor she owned and operated. We’d sneak downstairs when she drifted into a nap, climbing into the latest models in caskets. With equal parts hope and fear, we even thought we’d stumble upon an embalming procedure.
Problem #3: Papa, a reliable source for cheap thrills whenever we visited him on the weekends, was not his usual charming self. Instead of rollicking with us when he got home from work, he poured himself a drink and stared blankly at his TV/radio console while Patty and I prowled for hard old sticks of Juicy Fruit in our dead grandmother’s purse collection. We also splashed on designer perfumes of yesteryear, pungent chemical weaponry that no bath or shower could neutralize.
That brings us to Patty’s big spring breakdown. One night Papa left us in the car while he fetched some clothes from the drycleaner. She started crying the moment he walked away, comparing Poppa to the wicked guardian aunts in James and the Giant Peach.
I was catatonically bored, not emotionally demolished like Sis. “The visit is almost half over,” I said, some Boy Scout trying to score a merit badge in the art of cheering people up. “And we get to see Jaimie soon. I think.”
You see Jaimie – our raven haired, comedienne cousin – was the key to our freedom. She always showed us a good time, whether parading around half-naked to K-TEL compilations or shoving us down grassy hilltops in games of King of the Mountain.
Except for the time she gave me a goose egg by hurling a black plastic hairbrush at my forehead, Jaimie was easily my favorite relative. From her vampire eyetooth to her long black hair, I always considered her more of a glamorous starlet than mere kin. The fact that she once attended school with Tatum O’Neill and trained with Olympic gymnast Cathy Rigby made her even more of a dynamo in my eyes.
As ringleader of our romps at Papa’s house, Jaimie schooled Patty and me in the art of wildly inappropriate behavior. For a game called “The Blob,” she instructed us to draw hideous faces on paper bags and chase one each other around the house. Sometimes she’d grab a six pack of 7-UP bottles from the fridge and lure Patty and me to one of the upstairs bedrooms. We took turns lying on our backs with a towel wrapped around our necks, relaxing our throats to make way for the flood of cool, sweet fizz that we poured in each others’ mouths.
On hot summer days we gathered around the barbecue pit, waiting for charred hot dogs and hamburgers. Jaimie put her own spin on popular songs of the day. A Sheena Easton hit became: “My baby takes the morning train/He wears his underwear and then/When he gets home he takes them off/To find me waiting for him.”
Jaimie adored ham-fisted theatrics. Papa stored old toys on his back porch, and Jaimie dug through them until she found the most damaged doll or model car in the heap. As soon as she saw a neighbor strolling down the sidewalk, she’d run out and try to sell her wares for shamelessly high prices. No one forked over any cash, but it certainly wasn’t for lack of enthusiasm on her part.
Jaimie lived with her parents, Tom and Laurie, in nearby Williamsburg. But the arrangement was that Jaimie would stay with Patty and me and Poppa’s place once her school let out for Spring Break
Business with Papa was boring as usual the first night Jaimie stayed with us at his house. It wasn’t until 10 p.m., or so, that we took matters into our own hands. After Papa sent us to bed (Patty and Jaimie shared a bedroom, and I slept in one of two twin beds in Papa’s room), we met secretly in the upstairs hallway and decided to play The Blob. We each got a turn to decorate a paper grocery bag with hideous monster facial features, stick it on our heads, and chase down our victims.
Once we were sure that Papa and his nightcap were down for the count in the TV room, we let loose. Jaimie chased after us, her paper bag mask filled with bloody smears she made with Cray-Pas.
Apparently our ruckus was a bit loud. Papa yelled “Get to bed!” from the bottom of the stairwell. To his credit, he said this several times before he finally bounded up the stairs to tell us to shut up in person.
By the time he got upstairs, Jaimie, Patty and I had sprinted back to bed to feign sleeping. For some reason Papa bypassed Jaimie and Patty’s room and made a beeline for me.
“I told you to get to bed!” he bellowed in my face. The rest blurred together in a muck of spit and screaming, but I’ll never forget his concluding line: “I’m not taking you to see Smokey anymore. Nope, no Smokey for you!”
I hated Jaimie and Patty for escaping this tongue lashing, and I hated myself for incurring his wrath. I must have done something really wrong to make my generally peaceable grandfather mad, I figured. I couldn’t believe I felt so bad about not getting to see a movie that I didn’t want to see.
I had only seen Papa snap once before. It was a hot summer day when I was six or seven. When my family pulled into the driveway, Poppa greeted me with a wet kiss and handed me a white envelope.
I ripped open the gift to discover a greeting card and ten smackers. It wasn’t even my birthday – it was just one of Papa’s spontaneous, generous gestures.
Jaimie and Patty had already kicked into playground mode, starting off with a round of King of the Hill that would inevitably segue into a game of indoor hide and seek.
So I darted off to play, clutching the booty in my hand. About a half hour later, the fun and games hit a brick wall. It turned out that, in my hastiness, I had dropped the ten dollar bill in the driveway, and that an unusually vigilant Papa had discovered my sloppy error. Waving the evidence above his scantily-haired head, he tracked me down in the yard, his face flushed red as borscht.
“I’m taking it back!” he roared. “If you can’t hold onto money you don’t get to keep it. I’m taking it back!” Whenever flummoxed, Papa tended to repeat himself with brain-numbing persistence. He didn’t hit me, but he looked like he might. And he wasn’t kidding about taking the money back. Even at the height of his fury I just presumed he’d go soft and give me the money after all. But he just left me in the driveway, startled and empty handed, as he stormed into the house.
The Smokey and the Bandit episode and $10 fiasco made more sense to me later on, after Papa's sudden death from a heart attack in 1986. I learned, mostly from my mother, that the grandfather I had idealized – the man who hugged my fiercely and let me stuff my face with sugar at Mountain Park – was actually quite a brute at times.
When she was growing up, my mother woke up many nights hear him screaming at my grandmother at the top of his lungs. He’d come home late from a day of golfing and drinking, out-of-his-skin with anger at any suggestion that he wasn’t a good family man. My mother has trouble sleeping to this day, and she attributes this problem to the nights she spent sitting at the top of the stairs, pleading with her parents to stop brawling.
So yeah, as an eight-year-old kid I felt responsible for screwing up Papa's plan to take me to see Smokey. But at least now I know it wasn't my fault. And, at the very least, I got out of seeing a bad movie.
My near collision with the car chase caper came in 1982, the year I turned eight and my parents took a two-week trip to England without my older sister, Patty, and me. Their vacation threatened to end my family as I knew it. I felt it in my bones. Their plane would take a nosedive into the icy Atlantic. Or, even worse, my folks would abandon us and become Princess Diana groupies. I got this notion from my mother, who slapped her paws on any magazine with big beaked Di on the cover.
“Don’t worry,” my mother assured me. “Papa will take care of you.”
My mother’s father was known as Tom in most circles. But to his three grandkids – my cousin, Jaimie, my sister and me– he was Papa, a boisterous, balding, blubbery kisser who reportedly excelled at golf.
If the Three Stooges ever needed an alternate, They could have called Papa. He often fell asleep while reading the newspaper, waking up with splotches of ink on his face. He messily gobbled down sandwiches, howling when, on more than one occasion, his teeth fillings connected with pieces of aluminum foil that he’d neglected to peel off his sandwich meat. If he spilled scalding coffee in your lap, he’d make it up to you by tossing a wet paper towel on your crotch and muttering so many apologies that you’d forgive him just to get him to shut up.
Papa, to quote Ralph Nadar, was unsafe at any speed. But his no holds barred affection – not to mention the way he spoiled us with cash handouts and neon green glow sticks on the Fourth of July – left us grandkids with no other inclination than to worship him like a cult leader. He laughed loudly, frequently, and infectiously, a walking anti-depressant.
Still, his bottomless enthusiasm for a dumb joke could be annoying. On one of his visits to Connecticut, when I was four, Papa saw me standing naked at the top of the stairs. For years to come he found ways to tell strangers that he caught me wearing my birthday suit.
Ever since my grandmother, Nana, died in 1979, Papa dwelled alone in his big brown house on Park Street in Easthampton, Massachusetts. Easthampton is a working-class town, a regular Hicksville compared to nearby Northampton, home of Smith College, New Age bookshops and infinitesimal lesbians.
Easthampton may have been Northampton’s ugly stepsister, but it had a carnivalesque charm all its own. Oddball businesses lined Main Street, like a combination bakery & laundromat and a dilapidated X-rated movie theater that played Kinky Ladies and other “art house” favorites.
Spring break arrived in April. As our parents fled the country, Papa picked up me and my sister Patty in Connecticut. Per usual, he wore plaid pants and an Izod golf shirt. “I planned a fun time for you two!” he said, rattling off activities with the urgency of an auctioneer. I guess he knew that if he spoke any slower Patty and I would figure out that his proposals were pretty shitty. There was not much fun to be had, after all, at my elderly Aunt Vicki’s house. More than a little bit demented, she wriggled like a lightening victim and pooped in a portable toilet. When it was time to leave her place, she’d slap me hard on the hand and say the words “Last tag!” with an unnerving cackle.
He had some rotten eggs up his sleeve, but Papa obviously hoped to cover up the blemishes and create the illusion that the time of our lives awaited Patty and me.
“We’ll go to Mountain Park,” he promised. “You can ride the kiddy coaster. I’ll even take you on the ski lifts and buy you cotton candy if you’re lucky.”
He scored some big points there, since I was too young to distinguish Mountain Park, a threadbare amusement center in Holyoke, Mass., from Disneyland.
Back at Papa’s big brown house, we’d have complete access to his freezer, which overflowed with pints of Haagan Dazs. And we could raid his moldy refrigerator, where pop cans, not broccoli, inhabited the vegetable crisper.
The candy drawer was the kitchen’s next best feature. Located next to the oven where Papa once left a piece of leathery kielbasa for a whole year (he didn’t cook much) this drawer sheltered M&Ms and shrink-wrapped party packs of king sized candy bars.
Sugar binges at Papa’s led to lots of teeth fillings and humiliating jabs from my dentist (“Do you brush your teeth with Tootsie Pops?”) But the looming threat of preadolescent dentures never thwarted my candy cravings. I’d gum my mother’s desiccated pork chops if need be.
Patty and I said goodbye to my parents, hopped into the backseat of Papa’s sedan and resigned ourselves to two weeks’ exile in Easthampton. I calmed my nerves by letting a simple, reassuring fact sink into my brain: If things got really bad, I could always eat my way into a sugar coma.
Papa seemed to think that I, being young and apprehensive, needed extra incentives. Like a magician pulling a rabbit from a cap, he gave a bright-eyed smile, chuckled and told me that, one lucky afternoon, he would take me to the Hampshire Mall movie theater to see Smokey and the Bandit Part 3.
Even at nine– and even though I hadn’t seen the first two installments in the Bandit franchise - I recognized this upcoming cultural outing as bad news. My parents had already introduced me to vintage comedies like Woody Allen’s Sleeper and Peter Sellers’ A Shot in the Dark, and I really loved them. No spoof starring Burt Reynolds and a dead fish strapped to the top of a car could possibly compare.
Mind you, it was a good ten years before I feasted my eyes on Mr. Reynolds’ famous nude spread for Cosmopolitan magazine. Maybe I would have been more revved up to see the movie if I had a mental picture of Burt’s strangely alluring, hair-upholstered body.
I would have put the grueling melodrama of Sophie’s Choice on top of old Smokey any day. But Papa had been planning this surprise for a long time, and he counted on me to shit my pants when I heard it. So I pretended to be excited, figuring that, depressing as it sounds, two hours of tedium might be the high point in a highly unpromising Spring Break.
Even though I managed to dodge the Smokey and the Bandit bullet during the first week of the visit, Spring Break started off with a definite thud. Problem #1: There was nothing to do. Jaimie, an older cousin who doubled as a beguiling cabaret act, was stuck in school, so we had to stick it out until the weekend to see her.
Problem #2: Oldsters abounded. Papa deposited us with one of our elderly, sofa-bound relatives while he went to work. Aunt Gen sat in a recliner watching painting instruction shows on PBS. Her deviled egg-filled refrigerator and her decorative trays of stale licorice hardly piqued our interest.
Our jolly and generous Uncle Frank, a recovering alcoholic who leafed through issues of Playboy when he took us “shopping,” fed us kielbasa and queasily aromatic turnip casseroles. At least my Aunt Antone’s house was an amusement park. She lived upstairs from the funeral parlor she owned and operated. We’d sneak downstairs when she drifted into a nap, climbing into the latest models in caskets. With equal parts hope and fear, we even thought we’d stumble upon an embalming procedure.
Problem #3: Papa, a reliable source for cheap thrills whenever we visited him on the weekends, was not his usual charming self. Instead of rollicking with us when he got home from work, he poured himself a drink and stared blankly at his TV/radio console while Patty and I prowled for hard old sticks of Juicy Fruit in our dead grandmother’s purse collection. We also splashed on designer perfumes of yesteryear, pungent chemical weaponry that no bath or shower could neutralize.
That brings us to Patty’s big spring breakdown. One night Papa left us in the car while he fetched some clothes from the drycleaner. She started crying the moment he walked away, comparing Poppa to the wicked guardian aunts in James and the Giant Peach.
I was catatonically bored, not emotionally demolished like Sis. “The visit is almost half over,” I said, some Boy Scout trying to score a merit badge in the art of cheering people up. “And we get to see Jaimie soon. I think.”
You see Jaimie – our raven haired, comedienne cousin – was the key to our freedom. She always showed us a good time, whether parading around half-naked to K-TEL compilations or shoving us down grassy hilltops in games of King of the Mountain.
Except for the time she gave me a goose egg by hurling a black plastic hairbrush at my forehead, Jaimie was easily my favorite relative. From her vampire eyetooth to her long black hair, I always considered her more of a glamorous starlet than mere kin. The fact that she once attended school with Tatum O’Neill and trained with Olympic gymnast Cathy Rigby made her even more of a dynamo in my eyes.
As ringleader of our romps at Papa’s house, Jaimie schooled Patty and me in the art of wildly inappropriate behavior. For a game called “The Blob,” she instructed us to draw hideous faces on paper bags and chase one each other around the house. Sometimes she’d grab a six pack of 7-UP bottles from the fridge and lure Patty and me to one of the upstairs bedrooms. We took turns lying on our backs with a towel wrapped around our necks, relaxing our throats to make way for the flood of cool, sweet fizz that we poured in each others’ mouths.
On hot summer days we gathered around the barbecue pit, waiting for charred hot dogs and hamburgers. Jaimie put her own spin on popular songs of the day. A Sheena Easton hit became: “My baby takes the morning train/He wears his underwear and then/When he gets home he takes them off/To find me waiting for him.”
Jaimie adored ham-fisted theatrics. Papa stored old toys on his back porch, and Jaimie dug through them until she found the most damaged doll or model car in the heap. As soon as she saw a neighbor strolling down the sidewalk, she’d run out and try to sell her wares for shamelessly high prices. No one forked over any cash, but it certainly wasn’t for lack of enthusiasm on her part.
Jaimie lived with her parents, Tom and Laurie, in nearby Williamsburg. But the arrangement was that Jaimie would stay with Patty and me and Poppa’s place once her school let out for Spring Break
Business with Papa was boring as usual the first night Jaimie stayed with us at his house. It wasn’t until 10 p.m., or so, that we took matters into our own hands. After Papa sent us to bed (Patty and Jaimie shared a bedroom, and I slept in one of two twin beds in Papa’s room), we met secretly in the upstairs hallway and decided to play The Blob. We each got a turn to decorate a paper grocery bag with hideous monster facial features, stick it on our heads, and chase down our victims.
Once we were sure that Papa and his nightcap were down for the count in the TV room, we let loose. Jaimie chased after us, her paper bag mask filled with bloody smears she made with Cray-Pas.
Apparently our ruckus was a bit loud. Papa yelled “Get to bed!” from the bottom of the stairwell. To his credit, he said this several times before he finally bounded up the stairs to tell us to shut up in person.
By the time he got upstairs, Jaimie, Patty and I had sprinted back to bed to feign sleeping. For some reason Papa bypassed Jaimie and Patty’s room and made a beeline for me.
“I told you to get to bed!” he bellowed in my face. The rest blurred together in a muck of spit and screaming, but I’ll never forget his concluding line: “I’m not taking you to see Smokey anymore. Nope, no Smokey for you!”
I hated Jaimie and Patty for escaping this tongue lashing, and I hated myself for incurring his wrath. I must have done something really wrong to make my generally peaceable grandfather mad, I figured. I couldn’t believe I felt so bad about not getting to see a movie that I didn’t want to see.
I had only seen Papa snap once before. It was a hot summer day when I was six or seven. When my family pulled into the driveway, Poppa greeted me with a wet kiss and handed me a white envelope.
I ripped open the gift to discover a greeting card and ten smackers. It wasn’t even my birthday – it was just one of Papa’s spontaneous, generous gestures.
Jaimie and Patty had already kicked into playground mode, starting off with a round of King of the Hill that would inevitably segue into a game of indoor hide and seek.
So I darted off to play, clutching the booty in my hand. About a half hour later, the fun and games hit a brick wall. It turned out that, in my hastiness, I had dropped the ten dollar bill in the driveway, and that an unusually vigilant Papa had discovered my sloppy error. Waving the evidence above his scantily-haired head, he tracked me down in the yard, his face flushed red as borscht.
“I’m taking it back!” he roared. “If you can’t hold onto money you don’t get to keep it. I’m taking it back!” Whenever flummoxed, Papa tended to repeat himself with brain-numbing persistence. He didn’t hit me, but he looked like he might. And he wasn’t kidding about taking the money back. Even at the height of his fury I just presumed he’d go soft and give me the money after all. But he just left me in the driveway, startled and empty handed, as he stormed into the house.
The Smokey and the Bandit episode and $10 fiasco made more sense to me later on, after Papa's sudden death from a heart attack in 1986. I learned, mostly from my mother, that the grandfather I had idealized – the man who hugged my fiercely and let me stuff my face with sugar at Mountain Park – was actually quite a brute at times.
When she was growing up, my mother woke up many nights hear him screaming at my grandmother at the top of his lungs. He’d come home late from a day of golfing and drinking, out-of-his-skin with anger at any suggestion that he wasn’t a good family man. My mother has trouble sleeping to this day, and she attributes this problem to the nights she spent sitting at the top of the stairs, pleading with her parents to stop brawling.
So yeah, as an eight-year-old kid I felt responsible for screwing up Papa's plan to take me to see Smokey. But at least now I know it wasn't my fault. And, at the very least, I got out of seeing a bad movie.
posted by Stephen @ 10:21 AM
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