When the television series Twin Peaks originally aired, my wife and I were instant fans. Our interest in this David Lynch related series came about because we were fans of his film Eraserhead. We watched the first season and were hooked. We bought the book The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer to read over the summer between the first and second season. We read any books or articles related to the series. We were excited to watch the episode of SNL with Kyle MacLachlan as the host. We had good friends that were also fans that lived in Memphis. It seems like we had recorded much of the series and binge watched it with our friends. When the series was over, we met them in Memphis to go see Fire Walk With Me. Over the years we purchased the series on Laserdisc and several different versions of DVD and Blu-Ray.
My kids were relatively young when I was doing a binge watch of the series. My son and youngest daughter had caught enough of the middle of the series to be interested but they never really watched that much. I had purchased the Gold Series boxed set, which was the first to include the pilot episode and decided that the entire family needed to watch the series all the way through at least once. We gathered in the living room to watch the pilot episode. When it was done, my oldest daughter said she didn’t think she wanted to watch it anymore. I told her I wanted her to stay with it through the third episode. If she didn’t want to watch after that, she was free to go.
The third episode features a few scenes that I thought would hook her. The first of these scenes features the FBI agent getting the local sheriff’s department to help him in an exercise throwing rocks at an empty milk bottle to help solve the murder of the homecoming queen. The final scene was the one that I knew would set the hook. This was a dream sequence where the FBI agent has a dream where he is in a mysterious red room with the dead homecoming queen. He talks in reverse to her and a dancing midget. She whispers to him who murdered her, but we do not hear her. He wakes up and calls the sheriff asking to meet him the next morning to tell him the name of the murderer but the next morning (shown in the next episode) he’s forgotten.
My oldest daughter became the biggest Twin Peaks fan in our family. She was dressing like the FBI agent for Halloween years after the series had ended. We completed the series, return to it often and have watched the third season that was aired in 2017. When that series was released, there was an official on-line store that had several products related to the show for sale. One was a Bookhouse Boy’s patch. In the series, there was a secret club for the men of the Twin Peaks community that took care of things that the law couldn’t take care of. The sheriff was a member of this group and brought the FBI agent into the group. When he made him a member, he gave him a patch. The on-line store made copies of these patches available. I bought one for each member of our family and gave them as presents for Christmas. My Bookhouse Boy’s patch is in our printer’s drawer.