By Sharon Randall
I can’t say it was a spur-of-the-moment decision. It was almost 30 years in the making.
Yesterday, after months of talking about it, my husband and I decided to break down and buy a Blu-ray player to replace our old DVD system.
“Can we please pay the store a bunch of money,” I said, “to come out and install it for us?”
My husband stared at the rat’s nest of wires behind the TV, then squared his chin defiantly like Mel Gibson in “Braveheart” facing the English army.
“No,” he said. “I’ll hook it up.”
“Right,” I said, mumbling to myself, “let the cussing begin.”
It’s a good thing I love movies. Over the years I’ve paid a lot more than dollars to see them.
Growing up, I liked to stay up late to watch TV. My mother never knew it because I did so on the sly, crawling under the covers to the end of my bed to crane my neck and peer down the hall until I could see, almost, the TV in the living room.
At the time, I thought I was clever. Now I think it’s why I often had a “crick” in my neck.
But one night I watched Susan Hayward go to the gas chamber in “I Want to Live!” (“Just this once,” she said, “I wish it wasn’t ladies first”) and from then on I was, as my mother liked to say, a plumb fool for the movies.
My oldest child inherited my weakness. I let him stay up with me one night to watch John Astin in “Evil Roy Slade.” (Accused of having evil in his heart, Evil Roy replies, “It’s in my heart and in my hands, in my eyes and a lot in my feet. I love kicking!”) After that, the boy was a plumb fool, too.
When he was 10, he begged me to let him take a paper route so he could save up to buy a newfangled VCR that his dad said we couldn’t afford.
I was itching to get a VCR, too, but I made him wait until he was 12 to get the paper route. (It was the newspaper’s rule.)
Thus began one of the longest years of my life. Every morning before dawn, a stack of papers was dropped on our porch for the boy to bundle, stuff in a big backpack, climb on his bike and deliver to a 20-block radius. Sometimes, he needed help.
If it rained, I drove our VW bus and he tossed papers from the open sliding door. At times, the door would fall off. This was not as much fun as it sounds.
But the boy managed to save a whopping $400 and bought our first VCR. Then he quit tossing papers, and we watched a lot of movies: “Midnight Run,” “Platoon,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” “The Wonderful World of Pigeons” (that was any film I picked that proved to be a dud.)
But even a bad movie is better with really good company.
And a lot of popcorn.
Then the boy went off to college and became an actor, of all things. And I had to learn how to set a VCR (and later, a DVR) to record him on TV.
We don’t get to see movies together much anymore, he and I. But we still call each other up to say, “I just saw something I think you should see.”
We all swap suggestions, my three kids, their others, my husband, his two boys, my sister. We’re a family of critics. We all know what each other likes. If they tell me to watch something, I do.
That’s why we decided to get a Blu-ray. Our kids said it will allow us (for a monthly fee, of course) to “stream” movies from Netflix to our TV.
I don’t know what that means. But I liked the sound of it.
So we bought a Blu-ray player, and with minimal cussing my husband set it up (I plugged it in), along with a Netflix account.
And guess what? It works! Now all I have to do is learn how to use it before it’s obsolete.
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Contact Sharon Randall at randallbay@earthlink.net.