Show & Tell: In which I meet an International Film Star

Gather round and sit criss-cross-applesauce for Show & Tell, hosted by the lovely Mel of Stirrup Queens. Find more circle time people on here blog, here.

Every-other August, my dad’s parents would fly my family from Denver to Houston. Gamps would pick us up in the Cadillac with the air conditioning, or sometimes the white Oldsmobile station wagon, then drive us three hours east to Lake Charles, Louisiana. We’d stay with them for two of the hottest, most humid weeks of the year.

Luckily, their house was on Prien Lake, a large salt water body full of fish and shrimp and crabs and petroleum refinery run-off. We children couldn’t have cared less about being poisoned. All we wanted to do was stay cool and have fun.

The first several days were a blast, full of swimming and waterskiing and catching crabs off the warf. When the weight of the day was too heavy for even 10 and 5 and 2 year olds, we’d lay, gap-legged on the air conditioned sun porch, my brother and sister playing games and me reading my grandma’s endless Danielle Steele library and beginning my sexual education.

Inevitably, by the end of the first week, we’d be bored. Usually our whines were met with our parents’ requests that we go outside and play. The two-screen movie theater offered short relief. The mall was nothing to speak of, but I’d walk it with my cousin Nancy or my Lake Charles friend Annette. Atari hadn’t been invented. The Internet was still a glimmer in Al Gore’s eye. VCRs? No such thing. Bor-ring. You can only get so waterlogged before becoming a puddle of misery.

Until one day, Ganny asked if we’d like to meet a movie star.

We piled into the Caddy, stopping in town to pick up Annette. The Caddy took a little bounce as we sped across Kiss Me Quick Bridge on the way to the bayou. There, we found the shrimp restaurant where the star was making an appearance. We got into line and waited. And waited and waited. And then we saw him. Or was it her?

It was the International Film Star, Benji! We were so excited! To see a dog! Who had been in a movie! And done all sorts of tricks and stopped bad guys!!

As you can tell from the photo, I am the only one who thought it was cool. My brother Billy has perfected the Fuck You look at age 5. My sister Katy, age 2 here, obviously needed a nap. My friend Annette is distracted by something shiny to the left as she fingers her “personally autographed” photo of the star.  Benji cannot drag his/her gaze away from the tantalizing view of tons and tons of raw shrimp being unloaded just over there.

It was a thrill.

The other day, I ordered Benji on Netflix and watched it with Lauren. When I was a kid, I LOVED that movie. Today, not so much. But Lauren loved it, and when I showed her this photo of Momma, just a couple years older than she is now, with the International Film Star, I rose up at least one notch on the scale of maternal coolness. Or maybe a half-notch.

I also once hung out with American Idol finalist Ace Young in the VIP area of a strip club and somewhere have a photo of him leering at my tits. My tits were covered, by the way. I don’t think I gained any cool points for that one.