Older Sisters and Scary Fucking Puppets
October 8, 2004
First off, links. There's a Something
Positive Icons Group on LiveJournal now being run by a reader.
Uh... that's all the links I have for
today. I've another one for Monday, but I wanna finish something else
first.
So, today is my older sister's birthday. She's thirty-four. This
terrifies me for some unknown reason.
It means she's an adult and, worse yet, so am I. She's not the sadistic
shrew in pigtaisl who paid kids to beat me up
on a playground that I knew and my parents told me I had to love. It's
a weird realization.
Honestly, when I think about all the crap my sister and I pulled, I'm
shocked my parents allowed us to live to
adulthood. We were the poster children for the pro-Shaken Baby Syndrome
movement. I know my mother's hoping I'll
achieve some degree of fame so she can right some sort of tell all book.
He Was Always a Rotten Child by B.
Milholland. I can see it now.
One of the nicer childhood memories I have of my sister is from very
early childhood. We'd wake up idiotically on
weekends. I think we did it to piss our mom off. Now, on Saturday
morning it made sense because there were cartoons to
watch. But Sunday, we'd crawl out of our beds, march down the hall with
the no-skid pads on our pajamas making that
odd "skitch-skitch-skitch" sound against the floor, and plant ourselves
in front of the t.v.
First there was this show on Channel 5 - I can't remember the name, but
it starred these creepy balding man with a beard
who read you the Sunday morning comics along with his children co-hosts,
who looked very uncomfortable to be around him,
I might add. Inbetween his grating renditions of Charlie Brown and puns
too awful for even a four year old to not look
down on were old Puppetoons and Davy and Goliath shorts. My sister
liked this show a lot more than I did. Once it ended,
we'd flip over to Channel 8 for Gigglesnort Hotel.
Yeah - I remember the name of this show. It's scarred into my brain.
I really liked Gigglesnort Hotel, actually. It had a lot of neat
puppets on it, including a dragon puppet who smoked
cigars and blew real smoke from his nostrils. Seems dorky now, but in
preschool this rocked my world at the foundations.
I wasn't a clever child, you see.
I loved the old couple characters, the W.C. Fields ripoff and even the
only human actors. The only aspect I didn't
like was a terrifying segment in every show where a lump of clay with
eyes - and the eyes changed every week - would roll
itself out and demand for the human to mold it. Well, that's what
the host claimed. See, the clay character mumbled
incoherently so that only the host could "understand" him.
Because, you know, the idea of living clay randomly showing up on its
own free will and furiously demanding to be
molded isn't scary enough to a child. It needs to make these demands in
a tongue you can't understand. Yeah. That's a
nice touch.
As you might have guessed, this wasn't my favorite part of the show. In
fact, this was usually when I lost my shit.
Not literally, mind you, although there were a couple of close calls.
But my sister usually figured out when the clay
was about to roll out, and she'd hold my hand and keep my from
panicking, thus preventing tears and unwanted carpet stains.
She was a good older sister, and still is.
Happy birthday, Rhonda. I miss you. -R
