A few years ago, I bought a new bass guitar amp. Prior to purchasing this amp, I had a small practice amp. I had started playing bass at church and needed something with more power. And all guitarists seem to be continually looking for new and better equipment.
I never had a girlfriend in high school. Dates never turned into relationships. It was a rare occasion when I went out with a girl more than once. I have a cousin who would occasionally set me up on blind dates. We would double date on these occasions to try and make things go well. Things never clicked on these dates. There was one evening that seems more memorable than the others.
One day in 2009, I was channel surfing and I saw a showing was coming on called A Haunting in Connecticut. I had recently seen ads for a movie called The Haunting in Connecticut that I didn’t think had been released yet. The similarity of the names confused me, and I watched just to see the show on TV was the same thing. It turns out that the The Haunting was based on the same story as A Haunting. I enjoyed the TV show enough that I decided to go see the film when it was released. My son and my youngest daughter went with me to see the film.
My family and I started watching classic blaxploitation movies from the 1970’s on Turner Classic Movies several years ago. There is a sub-genre of these films that are horror films too. Blackula and Scream Blacula, Scream are probably the most famous of these films. One of the lesser known of these films is called Sugar Hill.
We watched Pee-wee’s Playhouse when it first came out in 1986. My wife and I were fans of Pee-wee Herman and were interested in seeing how they would do a children’s show. One of the show’s characters was someone they called The King of Cartoons. The King of Cartoons dressed like you would expect a king to dress with a crown and regal, ornate clothes. During the early seasons he would bring a projector which he would shine into the camera as he said, “Let the cartoons begin!” Later the projector was replaced with a remote control. The projector wasn’t the only thing that was replaced. After the first season, the original King of Cartoons, Gilbert Lewis, was replaced by William Marshall. Marshall looked familiar. It was after a couple of seasons that I found out that he played the title character in the blaxploitation horror film, Blackula.
When I was growing up, the location television station that showed movies every afternoon would set aside Saturday afternoon for Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller. There weren’t enough Tarzan movies to show them all year, so they showed Shirley Temple movies and Lone Ranger television episodes instead of Tarzan. But Tarzan movies were definitely my favorites. One of the most memorable of these Tarzan films is Tarzan Escapes.
The Exorcist was released in 1973. I was 11 at the time and way too young to see it. I knew what I knew about it because of pop culture references like the Mad Magazine parody and the Saturday Night Live sketch they did when Richard Pryor hosted in 1975. In 1979, it was re-released to a theatre where we would regularly go. My friends and I were eager to see it and made plans to go as soon as it was announced.
I was about 4 or 5 years old. I was in Sunday School class with about 10 guys all around my age. One of the guys was named Ricky. Ricky’s mom taught our class. Occasionally we would sing. One song we would sing was Jesus Loves the Little Children. The lyrics were,
Jesus loves the little child-ren
All the children of the world
Red and yellow, black and white
They are precious in his sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world
It was June 2, 1998. We were celebrating my son’s third birthday. We had cake and ice cream to celebrate. It also took a while for my son to open presents. We gave him a while to play with his new toys before we put the kids to bed. When my wife and I finally got to bed, it seemed like it would take a while before we could settle down from the night’s activities to fall asleep. We had been in the bed about 10 minutes, the smoke detector made a sound. It lasted longer that the chirp they make when the battery is low. But it only stayed on for 2 seconds at the most. It was long enough that we got up and started sniffing around the house. We found nothing wrong. We got back in bed but about 30 minutes later, the smoke detector made the noise again. Again, the sound lasted less that 2 seconds but longer than a chirp. There had to be something wrong but when we got up to look, we still couldn’t find any problems. We returned to bed. We went through the same routine 30 minutes later when the alarm went off again. This time, we reluctantly removed the battery from the smoke detector before returning to bed.
On September 1, I saw a few reports that said Graceland had been “vandalized” with graffiti. In addition, I saw several social media posts where people were outraged by messages of “BLM” and “Eat the Rich” were painted on the walls outside of Graceland. As someone who has regularly attend the Candlelight Vigil, I guess I was supposed to be outraged too. I felt at least obliged to chime in.