I thought that all stunts in movies were real.
That is, if I watched a scene of some guy falling to his death out of a skyscraper, I assumed that they paid some desperate guy to off himself on film.
Of course, they would have paid him a bazillion dollars, and given it to him a year before his big scene, so, you know, he could live fabulously wealthy for a year.
My sister used to believe that it was the old people in the Masonic Home (in Union City, California) who were rollerskating up and down the halls of the building who made sonic booms.
She believed that because I told her, of course.
There were armies of spiders constantly at war under my bed – the good ones wore, on their backs, a blue cross, while the evil ones wore red crosses (ah, how simple the world was when evil still at least had the decency to unambiguously identify itself!). And I mean ‘wear’ – they had a small piece of white cloth on their backs, painted with either a red or a blue cross; I believe I must have gotten the imagery from seeing some picture of a Knight Templar. They weren’t real spiders, either, looking more like how a four year old might draw them – a somewhat amorphous blob without identifiable differences between front and back, endowed with an undetermined number of leglike appendages. Should the evil ones ever win, they would swarm up onto the bed to devour me. To this day, I can’t stand gaps between the bed and the wall, and have cushions closing them up.
There also was some strange thing about three skeletons that lived in the cupboard underneath the stairs – a red one, a green one, and a yellow one, but I can’t recall exactly what that was about. Weirdly, I have an exact recollection of the texture of their bones, which was somewhat like rough, molten plastic.
Somehow I got the idea that a certain bank in our city was Minnesota. My Great Grandma lived there and I always wanted to go see her but was told it was too far. BUT IT WAS RIGHT THERE!!
My parents figure I must have heard someone say that there was a building like that one, or a branch of that bank in Minnesota and misunderstood.
My brother though, thought that if you turned the middle knob in the bath tub that witches would come out of the showerhead. He was too young to shower, Mom always gave him a bath. The first time he tried to shower and Mom reached for that knob, you could hear him all over the neighborhood! It took my Mom quite a while to get it all sorted out. He insisted that ME (?!?) and my friend Lorie told him that years before. (I really hope so!)
There used to be a toy store called Child World. When I was about three, my mom wanted to do a little shopping without me, so she asked her boyfriend to take me there. I didn’t know it was a toy store, the name makes it sound like an orphanage, and I pitched the biggest fit she’d ever seen. I can still remember my terror. We got it all straightened out though, and I got a sweet Etch a Sketch.
When my little sister was about six, she asked me explain why I said I was a sophomore when really I was in tenth grade. She wanted to know if elementary school grades had cool names like that. Of course they do, dummy, I said. Right now you’re a hooker, next year you’ll be a commie, after that a Nazi, after that a transvestite, etc… And when she was being a real pisser, I’d get on the phone to call Santa. Helped everytime.
I think I’ve posted this before, but I used to think that after each person dies, they loop back to being a fetus and start again. Fair enough, but I somehow decided one night that in my former life I had been pregnant but died before giving birth, and now my unborn baby was still trapped in my stomach, and I could hear it crying. I have no idea where I got this idea from, but I remember being pissed that nobody was taking me seriously.
I also had a family friend three or four years older than me, and every time I went to her house she’d get a phone call and hand me the phone, saying it was for me, and I’d take the phone and there’s be this wolf on the line telling me he was going to come and eat me. On one hand, I knew there weren’t any wolves where we lived and they certainly couldn’t talk. On the other hand, there was a fucking wolf on the line! I didn’t really like going to her house.
I always insisted on getting out of the tub before the plug was pulled so I wouldn’t get sucked down the drain. It seemed a realistic possibility to me; the water in the tub was bigger than me and it fit down the drain.
I thought that too, after I read a newspaper article where some star had refused to appear in a movie because he was supposed to die at the end of the film. Well, who wouldn’t say no to that?
When my sister was 8 our family went to visit family friends in New Hampshire, then we drove up to Maine to go to the LL Bean store and eat lobster etc.
On the way there we stopped at a Chinese restaurant. My sister was raving about the food and how good it was. The rest of us were a bit puzzled–the food seemed pretty average to us. She continued, “I knew this restaurant was going to be here.” Why? “Because we’re in China.” Eh?
With a triumphant wave of her hand, she explained, “You said we were going to Mainland China!” Er, no, “Maine,” sis. “Oh.”
These are hilarious.
I totally misunderstood the point of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” I also had trouble pronouncing L sounds. The result was that I REFUSED to even whisper either “wolf” or “woof,” thinking that if I did, wolves would surely come and eat me.