The Random Memory thread

[dwmckim]

Some of us have it happen all the time - for no reason, out of the blue, a random memory will pop into one's head that hadn't been thought about for years until it just suddenly appeared for no apparent reason that day. So here's a thread for 'em. Don't necessarily have to be Muppet related but i'll kick off the thread with one...

I remember the first time i had ever seen a highlighter on my father's desk and i was fascinated by it. Not knowing what it was, i thought it was a Really Special magic marker! When it went to use it i was wonderstruck by the look of it on paper and immediately knew what i had to use it for!! Grabbing a Sesame Street coloring book, i used it to color all the pictures of Big Bird.

 

[newsmanfan]

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My toad encounter brought up this one: as a kid (maybe seven? eight?) I adored frogs. We lived in a circa-1912 bungalow in Tampa, with a wide porch and a wooden porch swing. One evening I found my father out on the swing watching the sidewalk. Asked him what he was doing, and he said he was waiting for the frogs to dance. I didn't believe it. I knew frogs didn't dance. (I hadn't, of course, seen Kermit'e happy feet yet.) But he insisted it would happen, and so I stayed with him and stared at the sidewalk, the yard, the plants, the street for some time. It began to rain, light but steady...and suddenly the sidewalk in front of our home was filled with tiny froglets...all hopping joyfully in the drizzle! Hundreds of 'em!

I have very few good memories of my father, but that one was amazing. Just as he said, the frogs came out and danced.
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[dwmckim]

Today's Random Memory is actually three memories centered around one object: The Wig.

(1) Finding the Wig - i always loved perusing the thrift store for unique articles of clothes and cheap/odd finds like records and books. One day i found a short brown wig very close to my own hair color and something told me this could come in handy since i often changed my hair at the time based on whatever theatre project i was doing - this could potentially come in handy if i ever do a play with a flashback scene or that goes through different periods of time where a hairstyle change might work or something. It looked very natural and i just knew i'd get some use out of it someday. That first someday would be less than two months away...

(2) Wig's first play. Planet Earth Theatre was doing a production of short plays by local artists called "Here's Spit in Your Eyes, Mr. Bones" It was an odd collection since the theatre owners were frequently away from the theatre around this time involved with either their newborn or looking at moving to Seattle. The guy in charge in their absence was a "mad genius" named Kent - he could come up with some incredible stuff and was a total brain but a lot of times his stuff needed a filter: you had to wade through some really bad crass stuff to get to the gems. Being that this was something he was pretty much running, there was a good mix of really embarrassing stuff that totally gave underground theatre a bad name and some great pieces as well...thankfully i was fortunate to be cast in the better pieces! Aside with bit parts in some other skecthes, my main acts were starring as Doug a total nerdy character in a farce (i had my real hair greased back in a bad part and cowlick) and the wig allowed me to do a quick change without having to spend a lot of time washing and recombing/styling my hair for the other piece where i played a homeless person who viewed and lived life like it was a Judy Garland era let's-put-on-a-show musical.

(3) Even though the wig came in handy for other shows too, my favorite use of it was as a prank on one of the supervisors at work. There was this lady named Linda who had this hilarious habit of going over instructions or giving a lecture and just stopping full-on in the middle of it and going "oh, you cut your hair didn't you?" I KNEW i had to wear the wig to work and see how long it took Linda to notice it (if she did). It went absolutely perfectly. It took several hours for her to notice it while a whole other people was asking me about it as i shared with them my plan. Finally Linda gets to talking about something, stops herself cold in the middle of it and goes, "did you color your hair again?" I just smiled (as everyone else around was doing their best to suppress their laughter) and asked "you like it?" She replies "I actually kind of liked it better before" to which i just shrugged, "oh well then, i guess you can have it" as i pulled the wig off and held it out to her totally scaring the bejeezus out of her. HILARIOUS!

 

[dwmckim]

Okay, since insomnia is keeping me from my mission of getting a really good night's sleep before my "Friday" (Thursday is the last day in my workweek before having Fri/Sat off), i am doing something with the random memories filling my head and placing them here...tonight's edition is Early Memories...

One of the most frequent earliest memory flashbacks i tend to have is dancing in my room to records on my kiddie record player...my version of "dancing" basically meaning running around the giant Snoopy picture on my carpet in circles until getting dizzy (i think that more than anything explains everything else about any and all character development throughout the rest of my life)

Speaking of carpets, i was always fascinated by the carpeting in my sister's room because it was a very 60/70'sish shag carpet with orange and yellow strands and it reminded me of spaghetti. ("My sister's floor is made of spaghetti")

Thanks in part to Sesame Street, i grew up colorblind...maybe too much so...i totally got the concept of embracing people of different color skin but didn't quite grasp the concept of race itself...leading to my thinking i had a black older brother. He was always very tanned from the sun and i equated this with being black. (The fact that his general mannerisms and the way he would interacted with me reminded me of David didn't help either). I'm sure i shocked many a teacher or friend's parent back in the early 70's when i'd tell them i have one older sister and two older brothers, one's white and one's black...

When i was real little, i was scared of coffee. Kids weren't allowed to drink it - only grown ups - so this planted the seed that the reason for this was because something about coffee was "bad for you" and my brain being the type of animal it was figured the name "coffee" was a clue - coffee must be called that because it made you cough. I never understood why anyone would want to drink something that made them cough (though people smoked which did the same thing) but for the longest time i was scared to ever try coffee.

More examples of names of things planting images/meanings in my head...the next door neighbor was a total little devil of a kid named Mattie. He was slightly younger but he was a terror to the neighborhood because he was the quintessential "bad boy" always practically existing to make mischief and cause trouble. So of course i thought his name was actually Maddie (as in "mad") For a short while there was also a brother and sister in my neighborhood named Tony and Erika. Tony was very tall for his age so he always seemed like a giant (and i always thought of him in my mind as Tony the Tiger) and his sister Erica was this small almost runty delicate thing. When i heard her name was Erica, i thought of this as "Air"ica...and always had these images and dreams of her floating away like a helium balloon if we weren't careful and paid attention to her if there was a strong wind. I would have these images of her floating away and either Tony (because he was so tall) or a grown up having to reach up and grab her if we discovered she was starting to fly away against her will...or if they failed to do so, then she'd have to get help from a friendly bird or something as her only hope.

Slightly older d.w. memory - little schoolkid as opposed to preschooler: frequently riding my tricycle up and down the sidewalks of my block singing at the top of my lungs or also doing the same anytime i was on my swingset. My parents would always ask why i had to sing so loudly all the time i played outside and of course my response would be "you never know when there might be a talent scout around to discover me"

And closing out with a Muppet-related one - Little Kid d.w. simply could NEVER go to sleep or have his picture taken if there wasn't one of his many Muppet puppets with him. Of course i have infinite memories of my Sesame and Muppet Show puppets far too extensive to recount here but one of my favorites was playing with my Cookie Monster puppet and always grabbing real cookies for him to eat in his "scenes" which would of course mean that when Cookie ate a cookie, it would go into the puppet's mouth, through the space inside it, into my hand inside the puppet, dropped into my other no-puppeteering hand and into my mouth. I loved whenever Cookie taught about the number 10 by eating 10 cookies!

Actually, since it just snuck into my head - here's one more...i was always fascinated as a kid by the ketchup commercials for Hunt's Tomato Sauce just because of how they always had a closeup of the ketchup bottle being kind of forcefully (just shy of being slammed) pounded onto a table as the announcer would dramatically say "HUNT'S" <slam> "Tomato Sauce" ... and of course i would always think of this whenever i heard/read Richard Hunt's name.

Wow, i'm just free-associating now...this brings up another ketchup memory...i always loved ketchup packets in restaurants like McDonalds that said "fancy ketchup" on the packaging because it always made me feel like i was eating Super Special ketchup and the place i was eating at MUST be a good restaurant if it served Fancy Ketchup!

 

[RedPiggy]

LOL

My first memory (I assume) is when I was three years old. I remember being in an ER with lots of bright lights. The doctor draped a blue cloth over my head. I felt a sharp pain in my forehead and I kicked him and made him grunt (imagine where I must've kicked him, LOL). I don't remember much else until the X Ray room. Nowadays, X Ray machines seem so tame (and they have shrunk over the years, but still), but this looked like a huge, giant, freaky machine monster. I didn't want to go under the large metal arm. The nurse assured me it was like taking a picture. Even better, it was a MAGIC picture that could see inside your head! Well, my mom was always taking pictures (I guess if I remember that part it must not be my first memory, LOL), so I was naturally fascinated with this concept. Anyway, what had happened was someone sideswapped my mom's car in an intersection (red light? what's that?). Being the incorrigible child I was, I had taken off my seat belt. I then flew out of the car and landed under another car several lanes away. It was several minutes of shock later that my mom and my aunt even realized I was missing. A nice woman brought me to her (I had landed under her car, I think the story goes). All that drama and all I've got to show for it is a scar on my forehead, and you can still see where the stitches went.

Maybe we got to the movies late or something, but all I remember of MTM is the wedding scene at the end.

I remember being told that in the movie, Howard the Duck had a water balloon. (Took me until adulthood to figure out what it really was. I'm naive, so sue me, LOL.)

I remember going to this one dude's house on Halloween and he (I hope) had a fake burned half face. I screamed and jumped back. He apologized, but I could kick myself, even right after I did it. What if he had really looked that way? What kind of a monster did I just make him feel like? I guess the reason is I wasn't used to the idea of "realistic" make up yet. On Halloween, I was used to obvious costumes and obvious makeup at that age. Thankfully, now that I'm older I can hide my surprise much better, especially since, as a nurse, the wounds are real now.

I remember the day my (now late) maternal grandmother came home from a trip and told us she met Little Richard at the airport and he hugged her. That was so sweet of him. <3

 

[newsmanfan]

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Those are ALL great, you guys!

I especially love the word association things of d.w.'s. Creative types have a unique outlook...I think largely because those atypical pattern-building things our brains do sticks with us, whereas most people seem never to even develop them. Odd.

Been thinking Halloween a lot lately. Some of my earliest memories are of a real, traditonal autumn in Birmingham, MI (where I lived until age 5): a giant maple turning on-fire colors right in front of the house and sending them carpeting down upon the sidewalk...a squat pumpkin my dad made into a traditonal jack-o-lantern for the front porch...the crisp air chill when I breathed in and smelling wonderfully of decaying leaves and dark quiet moist things...that scent, ever since, is my favorite in the entire world and I'd give a lot to recreate it. (The Autumn Leaves candle from Yankee Candles is pretty danged close but not exact.) Something about the smell, the air, the FEEL of it all, overwhelming every single sense, amounts to a nirvana for me, and the memories I have of it are both comforting and torturous (nothing remotely like that where I live...can't WAIT to move back east!).

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[mariolover]

My earliest memory is from when I was probably about 2. I can remember we had this tunnel at my old house that I used to crawl through and I also remember the interior design of our old house a little bit.

 

[D'Snowth]

Why have I never seen this thread before? Second, and more importantly, where are D.W. and Newsie anyway? Whatever happened to then?

 

[Flaky Pudding]

When D'Snowth said D.W. (referring to the member who posted this thread) that reminded of a memory I have. I was eating lunch with a friend and he asked me,
"Do you know the name of Arthur's sister?'. I said,
"D.W. of course"
he said,
"No! It's Dora Winifred," and I told him that I was half right because they usually call her D.W.

 

[Pig'sSaysAdios]

Second, and more importantly, where are D.W. and Newsie anyway? Whatever happened to then?

Yeah, I miss 'em. So many members have left since 2007 when I first started reading this forum. Sadly, not too many members have joined or stayed consistently in the last few years to make up for the lost ones.