Watching The Movie

The windows at my parents' house on the first floor are fabulous. They're big and comprehensive and, essentially, the entire out-facing wall of the dining room and the living room are windows. They're covered by these sexcellent rice paper shoji screens framed in angular black wood. Once, when I was fifteen and an idiot, I was filming a history project with a friend of mine (who is now a famous singer-songwriter that you can hear on Pandora-- weird) and there's a scene where we're dressed in periwigs, frilly blouses and waistcoats pretending we're from the mid-eighteenth century and he, of course, throws a pie at me. Well, I'm laughing and I move slightly to the left as the pie is about to make contact with my face, and the vast majority of it goes flying onto the shoji screen. The cameraman, a real pro, kept right on filming until the end of the scene.

And then he screamed his fucking head off at us.

God bless my father-- he's really been put through it. You can still, to this day, see the discoloration on the section of rice paper that got besmirched by whipped cream.

Years before I was filming movies in front of these wonderful windows, I was watching movies through them. As a child of five or six, whenever a huge storm would be brewing outside, my mother and I would turn two of the dining room chairs around to face the windows, push all of the shoji screens out of the way, and we'd sit together and gaze in amazement at the storm outside. It's funny, the two most neurotic people in the house, sitting together, absolutely mesmerized by nature's fury. And we watched some pretty badass storms together, my mother and I.

We called it "Watching the Movie."

At the first crack of thunder, I would run into her room or into the kitchen or wherever she was and excitedly cry,

"Mommy! Mommy! Let's go watch the movie!"

And I would tug her into the dining room, shove the shojis out of the way, and come face-to-face with whatever the wicked world had to offer. Maybe it's because my mother and I were so afraid of, well, life, that we were the ones who gathered together-- maybe "huddled" is a better word-- and maybe I liked the comfort of being with my Mommy when there was tumult and tempest going on outside. Maybe I liked the idea of calling it the "movie", as if it were not something that could come through a television screen or a window pane and harm us, maybe that made it okay.

Or maybe it was just something silly my mother and I used to do when I was young and wore my hair like Moe and was clad in monochromatic sweatsuits.

It's getting windy outside right now-- I can see it battering about the very tippy top of a tree. I'm watching the top of that tree bend and sway, but most of it's blocked by the house next door, and most of that's blocked by the computer monitor, and, really, it's just not the same. No shoji screens with tell-tale whipped-cream discoloration, no big dining room windows. And I'm in my house, and my mother's in hers. A few nights ago, there was a huge storm, and my mother called me "to make sure you're all alright."

"Yeah," I said, "we're watching the movie."

"Oh," she said, "what movie are you watching?"

And I smiled and shook my head.

"Mommy-- look out the window." She paused for a moment.

"Oh! That movie," she said, laughing a little bit to herself.

"Don't you remember?" I asked.

"Of course," she said, "I remember everything."

And she does. Of course.