MetaChat - Doohickie's post below

MetaChat is an informal place for MeFites to touch base and post, discuss and chatter about topics that may not belong on MetaFilter. Questions? Check the FAQ. Please note: This is important.

20 October 2008

Doohickie's post below reminded me... →[More:]
...of a running joke in my family when I was in high school.

In the '70s, my mom was a MASSIVE Robert Redford fan. Like, seriously: she loved Robert Redford the way I love Paul Weller. (Being a fangirl is a heritable trait, evidently.) So complete was her indoctrination of me that when I was first learning the alphabet and my mom asked me if I knew a word that started with "R," I gleefully responded, "ROBBER REDFORD!"

So anyway, years later, my dad came across this issue of Life magazine from 1970 at a garage sale or something. Being a bit of a prankster, he bought it but didn't tell my mom -- instead, he propped it up in one of the kitchen cabinets, so when she opened it later that day, she got the surprise of Robert Redford's face staring back at her.

Thus began the ongoing adventure among my family to hide Robert Redford in increasingly elaborate and surprising ways. I once came out to see Robert Redford greeting me in the windshield of my car. My dad once opened a suitcase when he was out of town to find Robert Redford patiently waiting on top of his shirts. My mom opened a package sent from my sister in Boston to find Robert Redford inside, lovingly protected by layers of bubble-wrap.

I haven't thought of that in years. The joke must have petered out sometime after I went away to college, and my parents sold the house in Denver and moved to Santa Fe. I wonder if that old copy of Life magazine is still in a box somewhere out in the garage?

post by: scody at: 19:41 | 9 comments

Some work pals and I had a gag going like that with a Hello Kitty figurine years ago. We'd set up elaborate pranks to pass it back and forth. My favorite was when I had it delivered to a friend in a toasted hoagie roll when we went to lunch at Schultzy's. This was back when Schultzy's was a hole in the wall, and the staff could easily be bribed to violate health codes.

posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson 20 October | 20:02

That is such a cute story, scody. I love it.

posted by LoriFLA 20 October | 20:37

We used to do that with Mills & Boon. The game was called tag. The rule was, you then would have to read the book and tag someone else. You couldn't tag someone who'd already been tagged.

The more public and embarrassing the 'tag' was, the better!

posted by jonathanstrange 20 October | 20:57

My stepmother collects cutesy snowmen and decorates her house to the hilt with them during the holidays (at one point there were over 200 snowmen stashed all over). One year for her birthday, all her friends and family plotted to only give her the ugliest, tackiest snowmen we could find. One of her friends gave her this god-aweful thing that looked like a sun-bleached dog turd with a magical hat and whimsical sparkle in its crooked, fecal eyes. It then became a tradition for stepmom and her friend to continually re-gift it one another. After that grew tiresome, they would just bring it when they visited the other's house and hide it somewhere to surprise them (cabinets, closets, drawers, under furniture, etc).

The scary thing is, no one knows where it is now. My stepmom is forever terrified one day she will open a cupboard and the thing will launch out at her like that clown in Poltergeist.

posted by evilcupcakes 20 October | 21:25

Buy another copy, scody! Freak your family out!

One of my roommates in college had a war just like that with one of her friends, but with a Gerardo poster. She'd lay down in bed, look up to the ceiling and BAM...Rico Suave.

For my mom and her brother, it was a 1910 Fruitgum Company album. I think she may have slipped it in his coffin.

posted by jrossi4r 20 October | 22:28

My dad, sometime in the '70s, was driving down a highway with my mom in the car. They hadn't been married long. At some point, Dad muttered "Wantchoo."

"Oh," Mom beamed, putting a hand on his leg, "I want you too."

Periodically this would happen. They'd be driving along, Dad would say "Wantchoo," and Mom would say "I want you too." It was a nice little moment they shared for over two decades.

Two decades.

Then one day it happened again. "Wantchoo." "I want you too." And then Dad lost it. Laughed until he cried. Almost had to pull over to keep from wrecking the car. Mom asked what the fuck was going on.

"Well," he said, "have you ever been driving down the highway and seen a single shoe sitting on the shoulder? Haven't you ever wondered how that fucking shoe got there, and more importantly, WHERE THE OTHER SHOE IS?"

20 years ago, Dad had been saying "one shoe" every time he saw one shoe on the side of the road, and when he saw Mom mis-hear that, he just figured he'd keep it up and see how long it would go. And it went on for 20 years before he finally broke and let her in on the joke.

The moral of the story is that I'm not worthy to carry this man's bag.

posted by middleclasstool 20 October | 22:36

My brother and I crack each other up by putting labels in obscure & unexpected places that read:

THE LABEL MAKER IS NOT A TOY

posted by Triode 21 October | 00:08

Buy another copy, scody! Freak your family out!

I've actually been tempted to do that. So tempted.

The only thing holding me back is that, sadly, I genuinely fear my mom's reaction. I know my dad would love it -- he'd laugh and laugh till he cried. My mom, though... well, folks have probably read my tales of how my mom, once a liberal, has become extremely conservative. And in so doing, she's demonized essentially everything and everyone that reminds her in even the most tangential way of her past life as a liberal.

Take Paul Newman (RIP!), for example. My mom always really liked Paul Newman, too (though never as much as Robert Redford, and she did always seem to hold a vague grudge that Newman had gotten his big break after James Dean died). Several years ago, Paul Newman actually became a client of my dad's. (My father's an artist, for those who don't know.) He loved the painting of my dad's so much that he called my parents' gallery to thank them personally. A few years later, he flew my dad out to Connecticut for an event related to his Hole in the Wall Gang charity.

So Newman's an all-around good egg, who's been supportive of my dad's career in recent years, right? You think that the fact that his politics were different from theirs wouldn't matter, right?

Sadly, wrong. Well, I should say: they didn't matter to my dad. They mattered to my mom. A few months ago when she and I were on the phone, somehow Paul Newman came up in the conversation. She starting going on and on about him -- what a liberal prick he was, and how he would've been nothing if James Dean hadn't died, etc.

"Mom," I said, "you do realize he's dying of cancer, don't you?"

"I sure do," she laughed. "And he looks like hell." This from a woman whose own own husband had just gone through cancer treatment a couple of months earlier! "He deserves it. I hear he's a real bastard."

"Bastard or not," I said, "his money was good enough for you when you cashed his check for dad's painting."

"That's true," she said blithely. "So he was good for one thing."

"I gotta go," I said, and hung up.

I didn't hear from her again till the day after Sarah Palin's convention speech, when she called me while I was on vacation to ask me "innocently" if I was going to vote for McCain now, since Sarah Palin and I have the same first (and middle!) name. She got angry when I said no, but then told me I better get used to it, because she was going to be elected because "real" Americans have had it with elitists like me.

So that's why I can't bring myself to buy the Life magazine cover and send it to them. It might be a funny, an unexpected way to share a sweet family memory. But I suspect it would more likely just break my heart when she calls me to tell me what an asshole Robert Redford is.

posted by scody 21 October | 01:23

Ugh. Sorry, scody. That must be fun to deal with.

posted by middleclasstool 21 October | 07:56

← Amazingly accurate election indicator predicts a HUGE upset! || This week's Photo Friday theme: Fall/Spring. →

HOME || REGISTER || LOGIN