Friday, September 28, 2012

Babies and Aliens

A couple of weeks ago, I was just hanging around with family in our living room. At the time, the movie E.T. was on.

Have I mentioned that I love 80s movies?

Anyway, I had this random memory come of this time I drew a picture of the aliens when I was a kid (because every youngish adult alive today has seen that movie, and don't pretend otherwise because I know you watched it voluntarily or were made to watch it at some point.)

I used to pretend I was an artist of sorts. Most of my work when I was very young was, for some reason, some slightly terrifying pictures of a baby standing in a crib. I can picture them exactly in my head, because I drew like a million of them, all the same, all on white construction paper, and mostly in red pen. Also, the baby sort of looked like E.T., but skinny. And terrifying. At this age, I also remember drawing a picture of the aliens from the movie near their ship.

Using the same sort of logic that led me to once bring a hushpuppy home as a pet, I deduced that the aliens were all named similarly, with initials only. The next part's a little fuzzy, but one of the aliens was E.T.'s brother, and was given either "A.B." or "B.A." as his name. I dearly hope it was the latter. I guess he would have been a biker alien.

I also once convinced my mom to let me watch Raiders of the Lost Ark on TV, despite the gruesome content at the beginning, because it "went nicely" with my "It's a Small World" read-along cassette. I think I was five.

All that, and I was in college before I figured out that Fievel and his family were Jewish mice, and that the beginning of An American Tail depicted a pogrom.

We all gotta start somewhere.


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