SCARY STUFF
I guess I wasn’t what you might call a typical child.
Looking back, most kids my age loved hockey or baseball, rode bicycles and skateboards, played with Tonkas or Barbies, dreamed of ferris wheels and roller coaster rides.
You know, kid stuff.
Me? I loved scary stuff.
It wasn’t always the case. In fact, I remember going off to the movies with my older siblings when I was 8 or 9- probably on the pretense of seeing Disney’s latest – and then having them sneak in to a matinée revival of Jaws (literally even – my brother would push my younger sister and I to the ground and have us crawl past the ticket booth – we were small for our age anyway so hard to see that far below – and then pocket the money for the arcade later.) That particular day’s misadventure, however, was hampered by my standing frozen in fear at the movie theatre’s entrance, which so happened to be the giant mouth of said killer shark. What made the moment even worse was my little sister, jumping up and down for joy, excited to go off and watch the giant fish “eat ‘em all!”. As much as I tried to force myself, I couldn’t make my feet move past those killer teeth, so instead I was parcelled off, alone, to the theatre next door to watch Capricorn One. Capricorn freakin’ One. To this day, I have NO idea what the movie was about, but when I came out of it, I did two things: 1)) raved about it like it was some space epic unlike any other (Star Wars? Pfft. Who needed it!) and 2) swore I’d never let a little thing like a movie “scare” me like that again.
