Monthly Archives: November 2006

When I was a kid, my Mom was a school teacher and for my birthday parties we would get to watch movies. This was way, way, way before the days of VCRs and DVDs and DVRs and a pretty big forking deal.

She would bring home a film projector and we’d have to pick a movie and there weren’t ten trillion choices so we’d get some variation of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, I remember something with bears, or my favorite: Paddle to the Sea.

Wikipedia tells me that Paddle to the Sea was a 1941 children’s book by a Canadian writer named Holling C. Holling. (It’s a cool name but what were his parents thinking?)

The movie was made in 1966 and is about a boy who carves this Indian in a canoe and then after all his hard work, runs out to the front yard and lets it go in a stream. The movie follows the Indian canoe as it travels into bigger and bigger water. Being that I was a kid, I didn’t really get that the journey started in Canada and went through the Great Lakes to the Atlantic ocean.

I must have seen it at least a half dozen times because we also watched it at school. I still have vivid memories of the images of this film. The little canoe bobbing along next to ginormous ships. I would love to see it now and you can buy it from the National Film Board of Canada. I’m guessing demand is low as the only format is VHS.

Another movie that we watched at my birthday party and also at school at least once a year, every year, for-freaking-ever that I did not like was The Red Balloon. Omigod, I HATED that movie. Every time I had to watch it I’d come home from school and whine to my Mom. I can barely remember what I hated so much except I think it pissed me off that there was no dialogue and why was that dumb kid pointlessly chasing around this stupid red balloon?

Yesterday boingboing linked to the movie online I accidentally clicked on it and even just the opening credits made me mad. Ug, that music.

I also never liked the Great Pumpkin and I would link to it but the last two times I opened the imdb page, it crashed my browser. I think my problem with these stories was the futility factor. Linus stayed out in the pumpkin patch all night long: for nothing. That French kid had nothing better to do chase around a balloon that had a short expiration date. For proper literary scope, I should probably include a third example, but nothing is coming right now and this was intended to be a phoned in entry rather than an exhaustive study of my early cinematic experiences so I’m coming to a screeching halt right here.

I used a tiny sticky note to jot down some ideas for today’s post and now, shocker, I can’t find it. Oh well.

I know one of the topics was this rain we’re having. I’m guessing another 8 feet since I last mentioned it. I know PAC NW rain is legend but normal rain is like a steady grey drizzle. The kind of weather where you can still go for a walk or do sports or possibly even have a barbeque if you’re so inclined. Half the time you don’t even need an umbrella.

The rain we’re having has me permanently strapped into a life vest and scanning Craigslist for a message from Noah. Oh good and look, today’s forecast is for heavy rains. Fortunately tomorrow the chance of rain plummets to 80%. Cross your fingers!

With all this rain I’m surprised that instead of flooding stories, I keep hearing people talking about an earthquake we had the other night. They discussed it on the radio and in the lunch room and at yoga class. One guy on the radio moved to the west coast recently and was disappointed that he was in the car and missed it as he cannot wait to experience an earthquake. (Insert Jon Stewart HUH? here.) Careful what you wish for guy because waking up to shaking walls and tumbling furniture is not really a good time.

You can imagine my surprise to see in the paper that this “earthquake” was a 2.6. That’s not an earthquake, that’s a fire truck passing by. This is sort of like when Los Angeles gets a quarter inch of rain and the whole city shuts down and people up here sneer about how they can’t handle the rain. Or like what Minnesota thinks about us when we get a quarter inch of accumulated snow and the city shuts down. We need to reserve our excitement for the real deal.

Another item I wanted to mention is that I finished watching Lemony Snicket last night and LOVED it. I haven’t read the books, although I want to, but I’m too much of a tightwad to pay $10 for a book I can read in 45 minutes. I thought the movie got lukewarm reviews but Erin liked it so I got it from Netflix. I liked the story and the characters but I loved the way it looked and I was mesmerized by the closing credits and saved the disk so I can watch that part again. They should make a show out of that.

Finally, I’m sad to report that I heard on the radio this morning that String Cheese Incident is disbanding, I think at the end of next summer. I’m not sad for me, but sad for my spouse. I wrote a review of one of their shows here and I can’t find it to save my life but I thought their shows were fun enough to attend one per year. I had a one show Cheese limit.

When I was a kid, my hobby was writing letters. I collected pen-pals.

My first pen-pal was my friend Julie Kaufer. Her family lived on our street in Encino, CA and they moved to Malibu. This was back in the elementary school era and, not having cars to travel that 30 or so miles, we started writing letters.

For a long time I saved all my letters but this eventually became ridiculous so I tossed most but I’m pretty sure I have a pile of Julie’s letters in a box somewhere. I think the last time I saw her was her Bat Mitzvah or possibly a high school graduation party, but by then we’d grown apart and the letter writing was long finished.

I also wrote letters to my cousins and sometime around middle school, I started writing to people looking for pen-pals who had their names and addresses in magazines. It’s hard to imagine now that there was ever a good time for a 13 year old girl to list her name and home address in a magazine, but there you go.

Turns out, it was a thriving subculture. There were networks of kids who shared addresses and put together these little handmade booklets called slam books that had variations but usually listed a different question on each page and you’d fill it in and send it on and ideally, it would eventually go back to the person who made the book. You could also write to other people listed in the book. Then there were these labels you could have printed up with your favorite band or a saying and you could get these with a friend and stick them in the slam book or trade them with people. Mine had Journey and Def Leppard sayings on them.

I have no sense of how much time I spent doing this, I don’t think it was ridiculous. And I have no idea how many pen-pals I had because there were always new one and old ones dropping off. Let’s say never more than 20 at one time.

There was one girl, Tami from Georgia, who got pregnant at 16. She moved to a special class at her school with the other girls who were pregnant where the school hoped to at least get these girls a diploma. She eventually married the guy and then had another kid before we lost touch. I had another pal from Tennessee who got married right out of high school with a big fancy wedding. She sent me pictures that I admired with a twinge of jealousy. It seemed so romantic.

Every once in awhile I wonder how these women’s lives turned out. They’re both probably grandmothers right now.

Somewhere along the way I also began corresponding with men in prison. My parents must have been clueless, although I don’t remember trying to hide it. I do remember more than one of my friends telling me that their parents though it was a bad idea. It’s hard for me to have any perspective now on the appropriateness of the situation. I wrote about being a high school student. They wrote about their lives. It didn’t seem weird at the time. I never worried that one of them was going to try to find me and none of them ever did.

Only one of these pals lasted for any length of time. Bill was in prison on the east coast and now that I think of it, I think he was busted for assaulting a woman. Okay, so this entire post is evidence of what a moron I am. At least nothing bad happened.

Bill and I wrote for a number of years and I occasionally sent him stationery, I think this was one of the few gifts he could receive, and we even exchanged a few cassette letters. He was not very bright but harmless enough. When he got out of prison he hooked up with another of his pen-pals. I’m sure her parents were thrilled. And the last letter I got from him he was having a tough time and had been working at Pizza Hut until he accidentally almost cut his finger off. I guess life was not easy for poor Bill.

By the time I got to college I didn’t have as much time. I still corresponded with friends that had moved or relatives but I dropped the pen-pal thing. Although it’s pretty much email now, I still have a few people in Germany that I send paper letters to and I still like to write a letter in a birthday card.

I’m still in touch with two of my pen-pals from back in the day. I met Debbie from a gymnastics magazine. She lived in Maspeth NY and came to visit me once when I lived in L.A. She now lives in Florida and we usually check-in during the holidays. Darren and I met from a guitar magazine and he lived in Wichita until he recently moved to S. Cal. We email on a fairly regular basis.

By all of this I guess I’m explaining that I have a long, long history of writing about what I’m up to for other people. You can see how this blogging thing would be natural for me.

I think we need to start a movement to get Kenny Loggins back to writing movie soundtrack hits. He is responsible for three of the most spectacular cheezy movie hits ever: “I’m Alright” from Caddyshack, “Footloose” from duh, and probably the best movie pop hit ever: “Danger Zone” from Top Gun.

Don’t you sometimes make a list in your head of artists you would love to hear cover that song? Can you imagine Bono singing:

Headin' into twilight
Spreadin' out her wings tonight
She got you jumpin' off the deck
And shovin' into overdrive

Highway to the Danger Zone
I'll take you
Right into the Danger Zone

Or Stevie Nicks belting out:

Revvin' up your engine
Listen to her howlin' roar
Metal under tension
Beggin' you to touch and go.

That would be awesome. Too bad the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame doesn’t honor songs because I would make it my life’s mission to get this song inducted. Imagine the jam session they could put together.

You could make a good argument that Bryan Adams is the king of movie soundtrack hits. (e.g. “Heaven” from “A Night in Heaven” {Does anyone remember that movie?} and “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)” from the Robin Hood movie with Kevin Costner.) (While I’m here, I encourage you to check out BA’s bio. He’s been up to a lot since the summer of ’69. He also lives in England and supports a team I like, Chelsea.) But BA’s hits are mostly variations of the same sappy love song and don’t have the thematic range or rhythmic depth that Loggins covers in his superstar three.

When I went to UCSB Kenny lived in Santa Barbara or more likely, Montecito. I don’t know if he lives there now as we’ve lost touch over the years, but I suspect he does because no one would ever leave there if they didn’t have to. I worked at the Santa Barbara Zoo on the weekends and one Sunday afternoon Kenny showed up with his family. I didn’t actually see him but I heard about it and immediately had to go find a telephone (this was way before the days of cellphones, kiddies) and call my friend Jenny, because she was a Kenny Loggins fanatic.

She brought fellow fan, Gina (who you can see in a Kenny Loggins special going on stage and kissing him before gently being removed by security) and they stalked him from afar, taking photos. Last night I ransacked my old photo albums thinking I had one of these photos which consist of some people in the distance standing around on the grass. Sadly, I couldn’t find one.

According to Wikipedia, Kenny is still keeping busy including, and I’m so bummed that I just found out about this, participating in some sort of “Singing with Celebrities” TV show where he sang some of his hits with Lucy Lawless AKA Xena and super badass cylon lady. That would have been the best night of TV ever. Just the photos on Kenny’s website make me feel a bit tingly.

If you see Kenny, tell him I’m thinking of him and hoping for more hits.