Today is my mother’s birthday. My self-appointed mission on her birthday is to shorten the list of movies and music that she’s always wanted bit-by-bit each year. Some were easy to find like The Sentinel, a horror flick that she loved but hadn’t seen since 198-something. The hardest to track down was a CD of “Odori” by Hiroshima. She had the LP and would play it a lot back when I was in the 4th grade (which is why I like the group a lot myself).
I was walking around K-Mart just looking for anything in the DVD section. I figured I could at least find some stuff in the el Cheapo section. Right when I was about to give up, I was floored by the luckiest find I’ve had in a long while: a DVD set with Creepshow, Cat’s Eye, Dreamcatcher and Delores Clairborne. See, my mother’s a horror movie fan was cool enough not to just let me watch horror movies, but she watched them along with me the same way that my late uncle Jackie would do when she was a young’un. Before the VCR was in the price range of everyday people, we’d watch horror flicks on local shows like “Houlihan and Big Chuck”, “Superhost” and more. But for the full meal deal, it was all about watching late-night HBO horror and two of our favorites were Creepshow and Cat’s Eye. She loves Creepshow so much that I used a screenshot from it for a Mother’s Day card that I made for her a few years back. Seriously. So to see those two movies in the same pack out of sheer luck, well, that was an instant buy. She was happy to see the gift and plans to save watching them. It’s fitting because she was also given a cake from work and was saying “Where’s my cake?” like the guy from Creepshow. So if you’re wondering part of why I’m weird, that’s it right here.
I just noticed that she also shares her birthday with voice actress Janet Waldo and civil rights figure Rosa Parks.