Friday Evening Video

There are three movies that I remember seeing with Dad when I was young. I’m not talking about movies where the whole family went together. I’m talking about the movies where it was just him and me.
One move was “2001- A Space Odyssey”. This is still one of my all time favorite movies, which Jake long ago labeled “The Most Boring Movie in the World” (as he has also done with several other movies that I like). Dad and I saw this movie when it first came out back in 1968.

Another movie we went to see, also in 1968, was the original “Planet of the Apes”.

A few years later, we saw a movie called “Cold Turkey”. Out of the three movies, I have no clear recollection of how we ended up going to see this one. Since it didn't involve space or science fiction, it was not exactly the type of movie that I would go to see, and I don’t remember Dad ever bringing it up either. I suspect it may have been for one of two reasons.

It’s possible that my brother Steve had gone to the movies with his friends and I was feeling left out. If I was moping around the house (one of my hobbies), normally (if that’s the right word for it), Steve would have been the one who was forced to spend some time with me. Sometimes this would include dragging me to a movie, sometimes this would include dumping sugar packets on my head as we walked the train tracks with Peter King. But that was when I was younger.

We were a little older at this point. By this time in our lives, Steve was popular and had a lot of friends. I was not and did not. And while both of us seemed to be more than fine with our different lifestyles, it did leave those occasional lulls where I didn’t know what to do with myself. Which leads me to the other possibility...

It's equally possible that I knew exactly what to do with myself- which would have meant picking on my little sister (another one of my hobbies). It’s not like she didn’t deserve it, having had the nerve to be born and all. But on those rare occasions when the others in the family didn’t find my "good-natured" teasing as entertaining as I did, it would have been the general consensus that I was the one that needed to get out of the house- even though there were two of us involved (a grudge I still hold today, by the way).

Most likely, it was some combination of these two.

So, this movie was a comedy about a town that entered a contest to quit smoking for thirty days. And, as I recall, it was pretty funny. It had a few swears and maybe one or two implied “adult situations” but they were minor and I doubt they would even be noticed by today's standards. Back then, those were the kinds of things I that would have laughed at hysterically if I was with a friend, but where I was with Dad, I remember feeling a little embarrassed. I think Dad sensed this because at one point, he looked at me to see how I was reacting. Most of the time though, he was too busy laughing.

Maybe it was his idea.