Mamma Mia!

This year marks 20 years since my mother passed away and today would be her 95th birthday, so I'd like to do a bit of reminiscing in this post. Hope you don't mind.

As anyone who has read my blog before knows, my mom was a huge influence on my movie watching (and let's be honest, my everything else) from way back and typically on or around her birthday I try to watch a movie that either she loved or that I think she would love.  The year my mother passed away, serendipity stepped in and on her actual birthday a local theatre had a Gone With the Wind revival, which was her favorite movie ever.  It was pretty epic to go see that movie on that particular day.  My emotions were very raw, as you can imagine, but it was kind of soothing to watch the gorgeous, lush Technicolor images I had seen SO many times in my youth; it made me feel almost like she was there with me.

Some Athena Anita Caragianis Erokan bullet points for your enjoyment:

• She was fiercely loyal to her family.
• She had two brothers and three sisters and, of course, her parents (my yiayia and pappou).  She would do anything for them and missed them terribly when she lived in Istanbul and California.  She even named one of her sons after her baby brother, John.  These are the people that made me understand all about Greek pride. 
• I think she still watches over me:  the most striking example being the day after she died.  It was Christmas day (of all fucked up things) and my family was trying to retain some semblance of normalcy, I think.  I was driving over to the East Bay in the early morning.  Just before I got on the Bay Bridge I got pulled over by the highway patrol. Seriously?? I immediately started thinking "okay, I'm gonna tell them my mom died yesterday and I'll start crying..."  I was actually trying to channel my mom because she was really good at getting out of tickets.  Once, when she was pulled over for speeding, she said "Officah..." in the Bostonian accent she never lost and the cop (who OF COURSE was from Boston) immediately caved and let her off the hook.  She batted her eyes and giggled.  Honest to God. Anyway, it turns out the cops noticed that my tire was dangerously low, called AAA and waited with me until the guy came to change my tire.  Weird, right?
• She knew how to negotiate a deal.
• When I went to Turkey several years ago and met my father's family, all they could talk about was her.  I'd say "What was my dad like when he was young??" and they would all say (seriously, ALL of them) "Oh, your dad was so nice and your MOTHER...!".  Then they would launch into crazy stories about how she shook everything up when she moved there.  One of my favorite stories was about three young girls (cousins?  I'm still unclear on how everyone was related in my dad's family!) who wanted my mom to teach them English.  My mom said sure, but they had to repay her by doing chores for her.  These girls had NEVER done chores before (my dad's family had money) and were horrified but my mom stood firm.  Apparently this stuck with them because they told me this story 50 years later!
• She was also amazingly good at bartering/haggling - which is infinitely embarrassing when you are a preteen.
• She was ridiculously brave.
• My dad was in the Turkish Navy and in the early 50's it was pretty uncool to have a Greek wife (like he-could-get-kicked-out uncool).  So when she moved there (which was brave enough - leaving her home, parents and siblings to go start a family in a foreign country!) she had to change her first name so no one would know she was Greek ("Athena" would have been a dead giveaway).  They picked "Anita".
• She was PC before it was hip.
• When I was 11 years old and told her I wanted to spell my name Sioux (I think we were studying Native Americans, this was way before Siouxie Sioux...I'm old, people), she was having NONE of it; reminding me how rude it would be since we weren't American Indian. I was irritated but she was right.
• She was ridiculously accident-prone.
• She had a shit ton of scars, including one at her hairline from falling through a plate glass window when she was little.
• When I was young she literally almost rolled off a cliff in Santa Cruz onto the rocks at the bottom.  I nearly had a heart attack that day.
• She was a terrible influence on my friends.
• I would come home from work when I was in high school and she'd be sitting at the dining room table with some of my friends, all smoking.  Smoking. With. Them.  Sigh.  They loved hanging out with her.
• She was a total lightweight.
• One glass of alcohol made her goofy and giggly.  Once she was walking behind me after drinking half a glass of wine at a Christmas party and stumbled, dumping it all over me.  Thanks Mom! Your 15 year old smells like a dive bar!
• She could be kind of a jerk.
• To be "funny" she would comb my leg hair.  Har har.
• She was NOT okay when I was a jerk.
• Her famous line, when I was being an asshole, was "I always love you, but right now I don't like you."  Brutal.
• My brothers had a different experience with my parents than I did.
• She frequently told people that she felt it was MUCH easier to raise boys than girls.  When I finally did the math on that one and realized she meant ME specifically (I have no sisters) I confronted her.  She just smiled at me.
• She was pretty hilarious.
• When she lived in Turkey and was learning the language, she was entertaining with her mother in law (who was a bit stuffy, as I understand it).  She wanted to ask my dad's cousin if he was too warm and if she should open a window (I think he was some big wig in the town or something so everyone was being extra polite), but mispronounced the phrase and asked him if he had to take a shit (to be fair, the phrases sounded similar according to her).  She thought it was funny. My grandmother was horrified.  The cousin LOVED my mom after that.  And I think they opened the window.

There are a million things that I miss about my mom, but maybe the biggest things are her smile and laugh.  She had a huge, often used laugh. And her smile lit up a room. I would give anything to see it again.

And in case you want to channel a bit of Anita Erokan (which I highly recommend...it's liberating) you can start by yelling "You have a prairie!  Move!!" to any cars that are in your way when you're driving and then maybe watch a movie. Here are some (beside GWTW) she enjoyed:

Singin' In The Rain (or anything with Gene Kelly, frankly)

It Happened One Night 

Gilda

Ocean's Eleven (the original of course)

Wuthering Heights  

Silverado

Funny Girl (mostly for Omar Sharif, who had "bedroom eyes" - her phrase)

Happy birthday Mom.  I'm making some baklava in your honor.

xoxo...hashtagSueslife

Raiders! (no, definitely NOT the football team)

A few years ago I went to see a film called Raiders of the Lost Ark:  The Adaptation, which is a shot for shot "remake" of Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark made in the early 80's by some kids from Mississippi.

Then a couple weeks ago, I followed that up with a viewing of Raiders! The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made, which is a documentary about the film and the creation of the one scene they were unable to do when they were children:  the WWII plane blowing up. 

Watching this movie brought up ALL SORTS of childhood memories for me, most of which star my dear, dear friend Norm.  In fact, Norm is the first friend I ever had being that we met when he was born, 4 months after me.  Truth be told, we got married by maybe a clown (?) at a carnival when we were about five.  I'm not sure we ever had it officially annulled.

(this is one of my favorite pics of Norm and me. It captures us perfectly - Norm is clearly explaining physics to my family and I'm thinking "kitty!".  Also, I just noticed that my plastic (not stuffed) cat apparently was ready to attack Norm's cowboys!)

Norm and I were some original role-playing gamers.  One of the first things I remember us doing was re-enacting Daktari, a show that probably no one remembers (Daktari is Swahili for Doctor).  It ran for four seasons (who knew!?) and was the story of a (white white white!) veterinarian and his daughter who live in Africa and tend to the animals there.  They also defend the animals from poachers, etc.  They had two pets - Judy the chimp and Clarence the Lion (I think we can make a well educated guess as to why I loved this show).  

We constantly dragged ALL of Norm's stuffed animals out and "played" this show.  We were still a product of our times, however, so Norm always was the vet and I was the daughter.  Still, I remember her as being pretty cool so I was okay with this casting.

Fast forward ten years to the summer of '78.  I know I've written about this before, but Star Wars blew our minds.  I mean BLEW. OUR. MINDS.  Norm and I had a bet going as to who would see the film 10 times first (Norm won, dang it!) and it seemed like our every waking moment was discussing, analyzing, being one with this film.  Total immersion.  In between throwing Norm's dog Timmy his stick (he was OBSESSED with that stick - Timmy, not Norm) we started quoting the film.  And I don't mean random quotes.  I mean we started at the beginning and quoted to the end.  Norm was always infinitely better at remembering than me, but we had a blast doing it.

Remember, this was before videotapes (although there may have been an LP with some of the dialog?) so we were just recreating from memory what we had seen in the movie theatre.

Watching the documentary Raiders! took me right back to that time.  Basically, these two 11 year olds saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981 and it BLEW. THIER. MINDS.  They loved it so much, like we felt about Star Wars; they had to somehow become one with it, they needed to ingest it.  And clearly just quoting the hell out of it wasn't enough for these guys - they decided to dedicate their summers to recreating it shot for shot.  I'm sure they didn't think it would really take the whole of their next seven summers (and I'm sure they wouldn't have thought in their wildest dreams that 30 years later they would STILL be working on it), but they were fully committed.  

They nearly set their house on fire, spent their entire allowances and in the end nearly killed someone, so to call it an amateur production is a gross understatement.

But they just fucking did it.

And I admire them for that.  If Norm and I only had a way to access a video camera back then...Timmy could have TOTALLY played Chewbacca. 

Both of them, Chris Strompolos (Greek!) and Eric Zala, had troubled childhoods and clearly needed something to distract them.  And fortunately they have very different skill sets - Chris is a natural born actor (Greek!) and Eric is a total organized, anal-retentive producer-type - so their partnership was perfect.

They discovered that nothing was easy, so they became super innovative in scheming up ways to create each scene.  Their other partner in crime was a guy named Jayson Lamb.  He was at the time (and continues to be) an incredibly eccentric kid who became their special effects wizard.  

My favorite thing is that they would view their "dailies" at the TV station Chris' mom worked at.  At some point an adult who worked there saw that they basically set Eric's basement on fire for the Mongolian bar scene and called foul.  So they got some vagrant-y type dude who lived on Chris' family's property to "supervise". I think he might have been drunk and/or stoned the whole time.

Like all creative collaborations there was plenty of internal strife.  The boys ended up hating each other for years (to be fair, Chris the Greek was pretty much a massive douche and Eric the producer was very wimpy,  And Jayson was and remains just flat out weird) after they were finally finished with the project (minus the explosion scene).

Many years later a VHS (Clearly someone was doing their own archeological dig to find a fucking VHS!) surfaced at an underground film festival in Austin.  This led to a bit of actual fame for Chris, Eric and Jayson.  Their film became a cult phenomenon that eventually led to a Kickstarter campaign to get that last coveted shot in the can.

Well, you can imagine that nothing went smoothly (including that they practically killed their explosion "expert"...I'd hazard to say he was no "expert" since he nearly blew himself up), yet in the end they get their shot and it makes for an incredibly entertaining documentary.  It's lovingly done, you get the feeling that the filmmakers wished they had done something as cool when they are 11 years old.  As do I.

(My drink pairing with this is Bartles and Jaymes Wine Coolers (do they still make them??).  Seems like that's what these guys would have stolen from their mom's fridge for their wrap party.)

My takeaways:

#1 - Honestly, this puts me in the mind of the documentary, American Movie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMFZOu8rDUQ) which is fucking brilliant.  If you haven't seen it, watch it as soon as you can.

#2 - I'm pretty sure neither Norm's parents nor mine would have been okay with any of these kind of shenanigans so our project would have been shut down before it was started.

#3 - Norm, even though our marriage was a sham, you know I still love you!

xoxox....hashtagSueslife