Родители 60-х годов устраивали семейные слайд-шоу, а визиты соседей превращались в пытку

by Dr. Robert Hicks, columnist In the 1960s and 70s, the "vacation slideshow" was a unique suburban social ritual, more common than most realize compared to today’s variety of social interaction. I highly suspect it was modeled upon customs from the Neanderthal era when families one cave over were invited to look at sabertooth tiger bones and hear the story of their neighbor’s great hunt and how tasty their sabertooth was braised with tree sap. The family would politely give thanks for the opportunity to see the bones and gush over what a lovely time they had. Then on the way home they’d turn to one another and say, “Uhg! Our family sabertooth kill stories are far more interesting!” But I digress. In my opinion, our family slideshows offered a more refined level of enjoyment. Several times each year, Dad would get out the slide projector and boxes and boxes of family slides and we’d all help set up the straight-tray-slide-loading projector on the card table with a book or three underneath to raise the projection to the right height so everyone could see it. We used books that were seldom read, never adventure books or classics and definitely not theology. We even once tried the Seattle phone book, which was pretty massive and ended up projecting our slides on the ceiling. We’d then pop a giant bowl of popcorn, take a napkin and separate one outer piece and fill the diamond container with buttery delight. Sometimes, we’d make marshmallow milkshakes or root beer floats, or Mom would bring out fancy-looking parfaits in tall curvy glasses filled with layers of Jell-O, whipped cream and fruit – a poor family’s exotic dessert. We’d turn off the lights as Dad awkwardly projected our memories onto the screen, some backward, some upside down. On rare occasions, a slide would get stuck and the heat from the bulb would burn an expanding brown splat on the slide giving the illusion that a virus had infected our memories. Our family slideshows were the best because they were about us, captured on film and projected large onto a screen. This was great entertainment because we all got a chance to retell family stories or add new embellishments. The pictures we saw projected, as if by magic, came to life in the great oral storytelling tradition where everyone could offer a new angle to the story. The spoken stories clung to the images we saw, making them three-dimensional in our seeing. Sometimes there would be a correction of, "That’s not how I remembered it!" But it seldom led to a pillow fight. Though, among brothers, that was a good way to settle arguments with minimal bloodletting. But, that’s where slideshow joy ended for us and something joy-sucking took its place: “The neighbor’s family vacation slideshow.” The invite came like fingernails drawn across a chalkboard. “We’d like to invite your family over this Friday to watch a slideshow of our summer vacation to the Grand Canyon” or Hawaii – or, anywhere they’d been that we hadn’t, which was pretty much everywhere. You can never find a graceful way of getting out of that invitation, so Mom would smile and say, “Great, we’ll bring Jell-O salad” – the only thing that made it salad was grated carrots. We’d then practice our “Oh, how interesting” facial expressions and show up to watch what later I came to see as my first introduction to the nature of hell as a never-ending carousel of slides from your neighbor’s summer vacation. I think I actually once heard our neighbor say, “And here’s little Satan when he was just an angel in diapers, millions of years before he got kicked out and landed in Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost.’ He was so adorable back then.” OK, that’s unfair. I think what he really said was, “And here’s little Tommy with his diapers about ready to fall off his little rear. Look at his lower lip sticking out like he’s ready to knock that camera right out of my hands.” I realize some who are reading this may still have shelves in their basement filled with a hundred well-labeled slide carousels and an actual state-of-the-art projector from the post-Neanderthal era. And maybe you are feeling under attack by my very gentle comparison of your vacation slideshows to Dante’s nine circles of hell. I only wish I could apologize.