let's go to the movies (see the movies!) let's go see the stars...

when i was growing up, we used to have Friday Night Movie Night. i was little; this was the era before vhs. i have tried to explain to francis, but we have media-saturated youth, tech-savvy kids: he does not really understand. the simplicity. the painstaking effort. it truly seems like we're telling him the stories our parents used to tell us, about walking to school, in the snow, uphill, both ways. how, exactly, did one have movie night before dvd's, (before vhs even) without actually going to the movies?

enter the film projector.

remember those? francis does not even know what this is, but in my youth this was the device that let the living-room become the cinema, (and, among other things, allowed us to see a whole 'nother side of my dad, the side which was usually reserved for fix-it-time in the garage, where we were not allowed to go when he was "working". hahaha) this was the age of super8, and the movies we watched were movies of us. the white sheet would be hung, the popcorn made, the lights dimmed, and we would all sit around and laugh at each other. we could do this for hours. my dad was the family photographer, movie-maker, engineer. laughter, then a jam, then silence. (dang nabbit!) then lights, splice, ok -we're rolling... and back for more.

sometimes, for a real treat, my dad would come home with movie shorts that he rented from his work. these were segments of a movie, about 10 minutes long. not a trailer, but a popular scene. i'm not really sure how available this was to the general public; he worked for Kodak at the time, so we all felt like this was really special. and it was.

the evening's entertainment might include:
the just a spoonful of sugar scene from mary poppins.
the soccer game sequence from bedknobs and broomsticks.
the archery contest and the rumble in the marketplace sequences from disney's robin hood. (Long Live King Richard!)
penny's escape, from the rescuers.

we watched these so many times, had them memorized. eventually, the super8 lost momentum, but we didn't lose movie night. vhs was introduced, we started compiling movies taped from the tv. we had a whole closet-full of choices. we grew up on the tv versions of a lot of good movies. also, movies that we would not normally have been able to watch. i am entering that dilemma now with francis, which is why it is on my mind. he is at the age (12) where he's ready for action movies, and sadly, many of them just have too much language. even the older movies. he has been begging to see the Terminator movies, and so greg and i re-watched them with him in mind. the first terminator? no way. the 2nd one? well, it's not too bad, except for all the f-bombs dropped. so, again, no way. i finally remembered to search for it on the tv, and we finally recorded a tv version for him. we had a movie night and he loved it! we've been big on the Family Night Movie Night, too, trying to keep it special. now it's making me wish i had a closet-full of movies for him to choose from, but even vhs doesn't work now. do i start burning movies onto dvd? (next up: ghostbusters!)

it's too hard to keep up, but one thing is certain: we do not have enough times where we sit around as a family, watch the movies of ourselves, and have a good laugh. we used to do that a lot when francis was little. this past christmas, greg converted a whole slew of francis' childhood from vhs to dvd. it took days and was the backdrop for most of our christmas break. so we got a good dose of little francis-isms then. fun memories! but i've been recording tons of stuff, so has greg, and it just sits on our computer. gathering dust. hard to find. what to do with it??

so: i've finally bit the bullet, grabbed a brief moment of inspiration, and created my very own vimeo site. (i've added it to my blog.) i've uploaded my first dose of family memories. these are, so far, only my cellphone videos from this summer, but it's a start. most people, unless they were there, won't really find them funny, or even care to watch. it's a public site, i don't care who watches it, but really, it's for us. (and you, if you were there!) i'm hoping to stay on task adding to it, and maybe even re-introduce the "home movie night." we may have traded in the large white sheet for a small white screen, but the memories shown are just as real and produce the same laughs. i'm hoping for more...