Can you picture the moment of your conception?
I like to think that it was one involving great passion,
rather than an exercise in just getting me over, in, and done with.
But that picture. Even if it’s simply a still.
The photographer saying, “Okay, hold it, steady, right there, that’s good, hold it now. Hold it.”
And then my posed mom and dad are blinded by the flash –
I’m assuming at the top this is a nighttime photoshoot.
Can you imagine flipping through an old family album and Bam!
Huh?
What is this?
Wait.
Is this?
Oh my God it is!
Or a short feature – sorry, Daddy, no offense meant in the staying-power area –
but if your mental picture has motion, better a quickie, right?
How much of this could you bear to sit through?
Heaven forbid a feature-length cinematic extravaganza.
The big tub of popcorn kind. And the big drink.
The director yells “roll um,”
and there are your parents full on going at it.
For an hour and thirty minutes, give or take with editing.
Maybe with a before and after? Flashbacks in between.
Interviews with the principals. Humorous outtakes.
Horrors.
How can you even look mom and dad in the face at the dinner table
when you’re reeling from that theatrical nightmare?
And management doesn’t kick you out of the theater after it’s over.
You can stay and watch this classic again and again.
Trauma with a capital T. Maybe even a capital RAUMA.
This is the I want to bury it deeper than the bottom of the Mariana Trench kind.
But sometimes we can’t.
Damn the thespian pledge that the show must go on.
You finally being alive and all, the result.
That’s the price of admission.
And there are no refunds.
Lanning Lee 