I think you have to do these 4. The potato one is great, the dog one is great and you absolutely need Hacksaw: The Musical. I mean, in line with the dempgraphic and your satellite radio choices, how can you not do the musical?
Plus, the kids is great and creepy and true. So I think you really need to do those four. Or do you have more ghost stories? Maybe you could do a whole book of those? Or research so more local ones? You know - Ghost stories of Al-Benny or something like that?
Thanks for all feedback. I am going with the four mentioned above for now and then I’ll probably edit the others a bit. I’m currently writing a long piece on my father’s funeral (with chronological vignettes of my parents marriage [the suprising lack of scandal, the lady wrestling days, integration, why they moved back to Weokahatchee, etc.] spliced throughout) that is a challenge because I don’t want it to be maudlin or at the same time disrespectful in the humor. (One of my key memories of my father’s death is that I was on the phone trying to get an ambulance while my mother leaned over my father, gave him mouth to mouth, and when blowing into his mouth also blew out the biggest fart in the history of Central Alabama, causing the emergency service to think I was joking when I asked for an ambulance because I was giggling [nerves and… it was a big fart!]_ I also want to write more about Lucy (how/why she was committed, what the facilities were like in those times [she was there for 40 years during the snakepit era of mental health], my first time meeting her, her daily rituals [extremely regimented and OCD] and her removal to the nursing home [which is, if only to me, a sad and hysterically funny story]) and perhaps something to portray my mother in a more favorable or at least sympathetic light (she really isn’t an ogress, except for when she is).
Well, I just wanted to cast my vote in favor of you seeking publication. I’ve enjoyed these stories tremendously, shared them with friends, and I want to be able to someday say, “I sorta-kinda-quasi knew him when…”.
I haven’t been to this joint in months, and when I come back I find this? This… this is beautiful. I don’t want to be repetitive by adding to the Greek chorus of “Publish! Publish!”, but… Publish! Now I’ve got to go finish the haunted tale, even though I should be sleeping right now, seeing as how it’s Monday morning. When I crash tomorrow, I’ll know it’s Sampiro’s fault!
You know, this all started from Sampiro’s description of what happened when a hurricane was about to hit.
Hey, wait a minute, let me check the weather channel…
I very rarely post, but felt compelled to do so in this instance. I started reading this thread while in the middle of a John Grisham book, which rapidly fell by the wayside (the book, not the thread). Sampiro, you have a true talent - you’ve got to try to publish these stories! I also want to jump on the “I knew him (sort of) back when” bandwagon".
There’s been nothing terribly interesting about this one, though my mother and I got really frustrated at my sister last night. She evacuated once again to my brother’s lake place, then decided after the hurricane came through to drive back across 50 miles of a highway with occasional flooding and downed trees (she was in a 4 wheel drive at least). She made it safe and sound to her house, which got only mild damage as usual and prompted her “I’m not evacuating again” resolve which hopefully is only talk, but then she made an intriguing comment:
“I’ve decided I’m going to go study to be an EMT. I’ve been watching the news and seeing them work down here and all I can say is they need some help and some of the things they’re doing just don’t make any sense. And I’ve got some ideas for them…”
This might have some future potential.
Okay…that actually made me tear up a little.
Per an emailed request from a Doper out there (who knows who she is), I’ll bump this thread one last time for Christmas. I’ve already shared Christmas memories on the board so I won’t honor that part of the request, but since it’s a rainy Christmas Eve and I’m watching STAR WARS, here’s a kinda Christmas story (since it involves STAR WARS- well, alright, it’s not Christmasy at all, it’s set in summer 1977, but the point is… well, there is no point.)
At risk of sounding like I protest too much, I wish sometimes that I could project the images from my memory to show just how little I have to embellish stories of my family. I’ve recreated the dialogue, but the content itself happened. There are probably people in Montgomery who still can tell a part of this same story if they were there that day.
Episode IV: The Pirate, the Princess and the Palestinian Pygmies
Kids at John Calvin Academy were as obsessed with Star Wars as kids anywhere else in the country. It was not only the greatest intangible status symbol in an increasingly snobbish class, it was an experience everybody wanted on its own merits. The TV and radio commercials were driving those of us who hadn’t seen it mad, even the surly girl lit up when talking about it. What was amazing was that the movie opened when fifth grade let out and was still playing when sixth grade opened.
I wanted to see it of course, but nobody else in the family wanted to see it with me, and we lived 40 miles from a movie theater so riding my bike (not that I could, or can, ride a bike) on a Sunday afternoon wasn’t an option. My father didn’t care much for “that star and laser shit. If I just have to look at a movie I want it to be something with horses and music and things that are real.” My mother was a huge Trekkie when the show first came out but for some reason Star Trek didn’t appeal to her either, while my brother’s taste reflected my father’s and my sister, who did plan on seeing the movie, wanted to see it with her boyfriend without a 10 year old brother around. I didn’t want to wait the two years for it to come to TV, chopped up and on a black and white TV set because this one wouldn’t be public interest enough to commandeer the color set for, but after an intense begging campaign and even some moderate understanding of what a phenomenon the movie was becoming to the nation’s youth, my boon was granted. With a catch.
My father had to go into Montgomery for a long meeting on a Saturday afternoon at this time and agreed to drop me off at the theater. My mother was uncomfortable with the idea of me seeing a movie alone, but a passing comment from a most unlikely source resolved the situation. While dropping off the night’s leftovers (proactively, since dinner wasn’t finished), my father told his mother “Yeah, Jon here’s all upset cause he wants to see that Space War movie crap that’s all the big deal today but nobody else wants to waste their time on it.”
Grandmother shocked all by saying “A movie show, huh? Hell, I hadn’t been to a movie show in must be about twenty years. I wouldn’t mind seeing one again sometime. Always liked the popcorn.”
If Paris is worth a mass, then Star Wars in first release was worth a Saturday afternoon with Grandmother, and so it was that in summer 1977 I got to see Star Wars in the theater seated next to the only 19th century born audience member. She was on amazingly good behavior almost until we got into the theater.
“Five dollars and fifty cents? Damn! We wanted to see a movie, not buy the theater!” She said this to the woman at the ticket booth. A little known fact about the first release of Star Wars- it was really popular. There were lines for it very long who were being treated to a prequel on movie prices.
“Hell, it only cost me a quarter to see The Ten Commandments and that was a movie with the Bible in it! True it didn’t talk, but you still got to see the ocean part in color.”
I knew that was wrong. I’d seen The Ten Commandments and knew perfectly well it talked, but I didn’t argue with my elders. (Note: Cecil B. Demille’s 1923 silent epic production of The Ten Commandments cost an astronomical $1.8 million to produce and promote, in part because of its special effects and due to the expense of releasing some scenes in Technicolor. Even with tickets selling for under a dollar, it grossed several times its production cost.)
“Grandmother, Daddy just gave you a $10 bill to pay for our tickets and popcorn and drinks!”
“Yeah, but I’d planned on taking most of it home with me.”
“Grandmother, puh----leeeze!”
She finally complied. When I agreed to pay for my own ticket. After the ticket window clerk refused to believe I was under six (the free admission age). True story.
Then the concession stand.
“A dollar for a bucket of popcorn! That butter or molten gold?” I was out a dollar for the popcorn which pretty much did in what was left of my allowance, but she did spring the $2 for drinks since that still allowed her to keep most of the $10, which on an income fixed at just what was brought in by her six retirement checks, timber rights and bank dividends helped see her through summer, when fewer people died and she wasn’t able to get as many free meals.
Finally seated in the packed theater, me with the only Lucille Ball from Stone Pillow clone in the place, but not caring because I was about to see Star Wars, the excitement was audible as the lights dimmed.
“Last time I saw a movie the movie cost me a dollar. Popcorn was thirty five cents.”
The most famous movie theme of the last fifty years blared into the theater, along with
“I wanna say the last movie I saw was a dollar. Might have been a dollar and a quarter.”
A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far Far Away….
“How long ago you reckon?”
“I don’t know Grandmother.”
“Well it makes a difference for me to get into the mindset. They talking about Civil War or Moses or when?’
“Shhhhh.” Echoed by all around.
“I can’t make out what that says. Read it out loud to me.”
“It is a dark time for the rebellion…” I whispered.
“Speak up I can’t hear you….”
“It is a dark time for the rebellion…” said me and several others, mostly parents there with their children who were actually making STAR WARS into the equivalent of a Presbyterian responsive reading for the benefit of the old nut who’d had to sell her “inside the theater voice” during the Depression.
“What the hell’s going on up there? Whatever that big thing is is shooting… light looks like… at that littler thing…”
As the movie switched to the interior of the captured rebel craft…
“Now looks like they inside a ship. That’s a robot idn’t it? They used to have them in the old chapter shows!”
“Yes Grandmother. Shhhhh!”
“This the movie? They supposed to start off with a Bugs Bunny cartoon aren’t they?”
“No Grandmother. Shhhhh!”
“They don’t do the news anymore either?”
“No Grandmother” said a dozen voices, including mine.
Enter Darth Vader, surrounded by the carnage of the last stand of the rebel craft’s soldiers.
“Now what in hell did they think they were gonna accomplish when they’re already stuck up in the belly of that space ship?” I have to admit, she had a point there.
“Must be the bad guy. He’s dressed all in black, that’s how you can tell. You watch and see if he idn’t.” As soon as Vader tossed the lifeless rebel through the craft she helpfully responded “See? What’d I tell you?”
The pod jettisoned and the focus shifted to Tattooine. The crowd by this time had managed to part just as silently as when she saw the Red Sea do it once for a quarter so even in a packed theater, we had lots of space.
“Whereabouts are they? Looks to be like Palestine. My brother Tom sent me postcards when he was married to that Jew woman in Palestine, looked about like that.”
“I don’t know Grandmother. Shhhh. Please.”
“I got this expensive popcorn stuck in my teeth.”
Oh dear God she’s not gonna… okay, she’s doing it. She’s taking the popcorn out of her teeth and the teeth are in her lap. Okay…
“Thath there… lookth to me like itth thum thort of pygmie” she said toothlessly at the appearance of the first Jawas. “Yep… thothe pygmies done stole them a robot hadn’t they? Just play actin’ though. Pygmies live in Africa, not Paleth-tine. Africa is connected though, you know thath don’t you? Paleth-tine is part of the land bridge from Europe to Africa.” The teeth were back in now. “I reckon they just got pygmies to play the parts. Wonder how they took to Palestine being as how they’re from the jungle.”
In retrospect I have to admire her memory when Obi Wan came on. “That’s the fella was in that last movie I saw. I’ll be god-damned it’s a small world.”
“Luke, I have something for you… it belonged to your father.”
“Last time I saw him he was over in the Orient trying to build up a bridge for the Japs.”
“The force is field… it surrounds us…”
“Then he built it and be damned if he didn’t blow the thing up!”
“Shhhhhhhhhhhhh!” This came from several people, including if I remember correctly Sir Alec Guinness himself.
It was actually my grandmother though who gave me the strangest insight of all time into STAR WARS. It’s sometimes easy to forget that before she was a neurotically niggardly ersatz bag-lady, she taught biology for many years who stated in the 1940s that cigarettes most likely caused cancer and, less biologically, that man would walk on the moon in her lifetime using the same science used to bomb cities. That last bit actually cost her a job- absolutely true story. She lost another job for telling parents that any students who bought encyclopedias from her would get an A in the class. Also absolutely true.
“You see, that Death Star thing is like a big egg, like a woman’s egg. And all those Xs and Ys, they’re like sperm going into fertilize it. Only one of them will get there.”
The conception theory of STAR WARS was absolutely brilliant and probably my most impressive memory of Grandmother. Her stating that
“I’ll bet that monkey dog wants to have his way with that princess. That pirate ought to better kill him to quit it from happening.”
“Well, that isn’t how I remember movies” she said on the ride home.
“What the hell is that movie about anyway?” asked my father. “Make any damned sense to you?”
“Well, it was a weird one, but I understood most of it I reckon. Point is there was this farmboy and a pirate and they saved this princess who was in prison on a space ship looked like, and that man who blew the bridge up over in Burma was in it and found a robot got stole by pygmies, then he died in a sword fight with a seven foot man in black and then they had a scene looked like a big egg getting inseminated. But I gotta say that princess was the prettiest thing you ever saw in the final scene.”
“Hmm. And people paid money to see that shit?”
“Paid money, hell? You know how much they get for popcorn? A dollar! Hell, you could go to movies for a year for a dollar when I was young, and they had the Bible in ‘em.”
“I’m hungry. You want to stop and get a cheeseburger at Little Sam’s Café?”
“Who’s paying for it?”
“You got any left out of that $10 bill I gave you?”
“Nope” she lied.
“Then looks like I am.”
And the pirates and the pygmies and the gametes and the bridge builders were the first showing of STAR WARS.
Thank you Sampiro, I will forever after think of Luke Skywalker as the sperm that blew up the DeathStar! 
I can’t for the life of me remember if he was X or Y. (According to rumor, Jamie Lee Curtis would be flying both fighters at once.)
You mean Carrie Fisher, right?
OhSampiro!
Thank you so much!
Seriously, that’s just what I needed, and my goodness you’re funny!
Enjoy your Christma, I have to go and help my parents stuff a turkey…not an easy thing when your sister is a bartender at a cocktail bar and has just been demonstrating how to make the perfect Martini…
No. (She wasn’t in Star Wars, but sure would have been purty up in there.)
Umm, Okay, I guess. Jamie Lee just seemed a bit of a non-sequitur in a Star Wars themed post, hence my confusion. (I had never heard the intersexual rumor about her.)
I jes read that out loud to my SO, and I put my best Southern drawl into it. I was cracking myself up before I was done!
I can see it so clearly. Sampiro, I love you. You are absolutely the funniest writer I have ever read. Please don’t forget us little folks when you are rich and famous. 
At the Family Festivus this afternoon my brother shared this memory of my Grandmother that I’d never heard but it’s so her:
When my brother was home from college one weekend ca. 1980, Grandmother called the house (we lived a few hundred yards away) and he picked up the phone.
“There’s a snake in my kitchen! A big ol’ snake! I need you to come down here and kill it right now so that I can make me and Lucy’s breakfast without getting bit dead and me over 80 years old!”
So my brother grabbed the nearest rifle and walked down to her house. “Kill it! Get in there and kill it!”
He went into the kitchen expecting to see a snake on the floor or under the table. “Where is it? Is it behind the refrigerator?”
“No! It’s in the kitchen sink!”
He looked in the sink and sure enough, there was a baby King snake, about a foot long. If you’re not familiar with King Snakes they’re pretty much harmless except to other snakes. How it got in her sink I don’t know- perhaps it crawled up the drain or hailed UPS or whatever. My brother took aim at it with the rifle.
“Stop! You’re not about to shoot my sink are you! Take it out of there first!”
My brother doesn’t have my phobia of snakes but he definitely recognizes their “ick” factor and besides which he wasn’t absolutely sure if King Snakes are harmless, so he told her “Hell no! I’m not going anywhere near that damned thing!”
Grandmother gave out a disgusted sigh and said “Well hell… I’ll get it.” She picked up the nearest croker sack (reminder: she wore croker sacks as capes when she was working outside), tossed it over the sink, reached with her hand and picked the snake up out of the sing, walked it to the door and put it in a bucket on her porch, then turned back to my brother and said
“Now come here and shoot the son-of-a-bitch!”
David asked her “Why? Why do you want me to shoot it now that it’s out of the house?”
She answered with the obvious “Cause shootin’ it is the quickest way to kill it!”
“Well, it’s out of your house, why do you need it killed?”
“How else the other snakes gonna learn to leave my kitchen the hell alone?”
My brother pardoned the snake and went home.
Do you think she was planning to put its head on a spike as a warning?
There’s a country superstition that animals can smell the blood of their own kind and will stay away. I’m guessing it was something to do with that. Or it could have just been a Steve Zissou style revenge.
We had an ancient black handyman, Lafe (pronounced “lah-Fay”), who hung snakes in trees during dry spells to bring on rain. Can’t say it worked, but eventually we would always get rain. (It’s interesting the degree to which snakes work their way into Southern folk mythology and the degree to which very filtered down voodoo [in which the snake is sacred] lives in some of the backwoods among both white and black folks.)
Speaking of snakes, the reason the story came up was because my brother lives in Andalusia, a city of about 10,000 in southeast Alabama. Andalusia has been at war with it’s neighboring city, Opp (“the land of Opportunity”), for years (think of the rivaly as The Dixiad) over ownership of a highly controversial but highly lucrative annual Rattlesnake Rodeo. Opp held the event for decades and Andalusia has wanted it (pure greed: they already have the International World Domino Championship, what more do they need?).
It’s almost a novel in itself. When it looked like Andalusia wouldn’t be able to steal it, their legislator actually attempted to sponsor legislation that would outlaw it (the wisdom of Billy Joe Solomon: “Cut the living rattler in half!”) on the basis of its ecological damage. It is ecologically damaging- tens of thousands of rattlesnakes have been killed over the history of the event, and while nobody who’s ever lived in rural Alabama has any love for the vicious little rattling bastards (well, a few might), as one of the area’s most active indigenous predators they are vital to the highly complex Alabama ecosystem (Alabama is one of if not the most ecologically diverse areas of North America [I believe- Ogre can correct me if I’m wrong]).
The legislation was quickly killed when Andalusia finally won the Rodeo somehow. Opp, however, wasn’t willing to call retreat, and so now there are TWO Rattlesnake Rodeos, essentially the Pretender to the Rattling Throne and the True Serpentine Court in Exile, making it even more damaging to the environment.
In order to cement its newfound claim as the True Rattlesnake Rodeo, Andalusia held a huge parade that featured floats and convertibles (my brother: “If you drive a convertible in small town Alabama, you can just rest assured you’re gonna be in some damned parade with a jailbait beauty queen behind you at some point in the year”) and lawnmower races. It got off to an ominous start when two of the riding lawn mowers turned over and injured the drivers. Though the drivers weren’t injured seriously, it was enough for a minister in Opp to incorporate it into his sermon as “They reap what they sowed” and “the snake in the grass of their theft turned over their lawn mowers” which is somewhere between beautiful and scary.
Love it or hate it, there is no place like the rural South.