GORT, KLAATU BARATA NIKTO...

man, i loved that movie...i think i might have been about 7-8 when THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL came out..and i was in love with gort..not michael rennie.but the robot..he was sooo cool..wanted to be carried off by him...back then you could go to the movie for .50 and watch 5-6 cartoons, a western serial,a tarzan serial, boy of the jungle serial and then the movie..all fucking day long...cheap babysitter...daddy would give me a $1.00 and what ever money i had managed to con out of various relatives and could go to the movie..buy a dr.pepper, popcorn, chicken legs, pink peanut patties and butterfinger for under a buck..the correct name for chicken legs was chicken sticks but we always called them chicken legs...and we also called the pink peanut patties elephant shit..not sure why..maybe because it kind of looked like it came from an elephant? who knows ..we were so dumb back then..of course baby ruth was called dog turds..when i lived on base like hickam afb in hawaii. on sats we could see cartoons all day long for .10..only on saturdays..i never was really big on cartoons so i didnt go all that much..now that i look back on it i think the only time i went was went mother and daddy forced me to go...now i know they wanted me out of the house all day long so they could have sex..i remember watching the queen of england's coronation at the movie theater and being totally blow away by all the jewels..the crown, the furs..the golden carriage drawn by those magnificant horses..all those fancy dudes in the red and gold uniforms..wow..so cool..trying to remember the name of the theater in mesquite, texas that we used to go to..saw my first elvis presley movie there..had to watch it all day long to be able to hear what was being said as the girls screamed all the way thru it..by the 3-4th viewing they were wore out enought that i could actually hear them speaking..but every time HE came on..they would start screaming again..i made a vow that i would never be like those girls..so embarrasing to me. then i heard gene vincent and i was a goner..ahhhhh...oh, the name of the movie theater was the texan...when i lived in mesquite the population was about 1,800..and we were kin to most of them..my grandmother's brother ran the anderson grocery store..and i remember mrs. weeks ran the other little grocery store..alot like the one we have here in west..i remember there was a laundry...was a huge gigantic room full of old metal square tubs..people would bring their laundry in and do them in those big tubs..had big old wooden sticks to stir the clothes around in the tubs..and hot steam was everywhere..must have been 115 degrees in there..remember the smell of bleach and blueing and so strong would make your eyes water..while my grandmother(big mama) would do her laundry every sat. us kids would go to the 5 and dime store..it had wooden floors that creaked when you walked on them..remember the parfum in the dark purple bottle? man it stunk..but it only cost like .25 or less and we bought it up by the truck load..that and witch hazel...remember my aunt estelle telling me and my cousin diane that we smelled like a french 'hor house..and we thought that was a good thing..french parfum, french 'hors..man..it just didnt get any better than that..after we had splashed enough parfum on us we would go to weeks grocery store and buy dr.pepper for .5cents..i remember when it went up to a dime and we were just so irate...diane and i drank dr.pepper and her brother michael ray drank grape nehi...i thought he had a purple birth mark on his upper lip when i was really little .then i saw him all washed up for church one sunday and his birth mark was gone..aunt estelle had washed the grape nehi off...we didnt have tv to keep us intertained and only radio in the house was in daddy red's bedroom..(grandpa) and he was always listening to some game or 'the opry...so we intertained ourselves by playing games outside..we pretended we were people in movies..i was always the black stallion..i read more than the other kids and i was into the black stallion big time..i would prance around the back yard, whinnying, snorting and flipping my hair around like a horse..they would try to rope me and 'tame me'... i would kick the shit out of them..ahhh, the good ole days...