Summertime Butt Whoopins and Crushing on Your Cousin

Summertime memories of my odd hillbilly family.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good evening. This is Lisa and I am shiny side out. As my summer break gently winds to a close, um, tonight I'm finding myself thinking a lot about the the summers that I spent with my family over the years. The earliest one I can remember was when I was five and my sister Angie was three. Our parents decided that it was time for the great American road trip. Now we we didn't do this kind of thing. We we weren't that family. My my dad always worked 365 days a year. So we we had never been on a vacation, we didn't know what to do. So uh one night uh we did our getting ready to go to bed stuff, and mom put us to bed and said, we are going, we're gonna be leaving for the uh we're gonna be leaving for Disneyland first thing in the morning. Well, first thing in the morning turned into 10 o'clock that night. So they took a whole bunch of pillows and a whole bunch of blankets and put it in the back of the Country Squire station wagon and put Angie and myself to bed in the back of the station wagon, and they took off cross country through the desert, overhill, and over dale until we wound up getting to Bakersfield, California. In Bakersfield, California was my great uncle. Uh his name was Orbia. Yeah, he uh one of those old old names, Orbia and his uh his wife Marie. Now Marie had a grandson from a prior marriage, and his name was Mark. Uh Mark was I think a year maybe two older than me, and certainly older than Angie, and he was just the cutest thing I had ever seen. Ugh, perfect manners, tidy hair, and he knew the coolest games. He uh he was the person who first taught me to blow things up. They lived in a trailer house in the middle of the desert, and there was this big rocky hill, and Mark had a one of those saucer sleds that most people use in the snow. Well, he used it to slide down this giant rocky hill. It had to be a hundred feet high. Um, I was too chicken to do it, but but Angie did, and she was three, and everybody got a whooping because Angie went down the giant hill. I thought it was funny. So we met up with them there, and then all of us, my little family, mom, dad, me, Angie, and Uncle Orb and Aunt Marie and Cousin Mark all went to Disneyland. Angie and I were wearing the cutest little uh red and white polka dotted sundresses uh matching that my mom had sewn for us with our own little hands. Um, we didn't get any mouse ears. I think that was back in the days before they did the mouse ears. This would have been 1970, it seems like. Um and we just kind of did the touristy thing. We I rode the matterhorn at Disney World at five years old. My dad put uh napkins in my shoes so I would meet the height requirement. But let me tell you right now, I rode the Matterhorn against my will. Um, but god on it, it was horrible. I kept thinking I was gonna get decapitated. I later wrote it when I was in my 20s, and it was amazing. But at five years old, it was scary and terrifying. Of course, it didn't help that my uncle and my father were talking about some guy who got decapitated on the matter horn, and I'm going, you don't tell that to a five-year-old right before you ride this stupid thing. Well, we we we did Disney World and we were getting ready to go do lunch or go see something, or it's back when you had little paper tickets, and I think we had to go get more E-ride tickets for the haunted mansion, which emotionally scarred me, but that's a story for another day. And we looked around and Angie was gone. Well, apparently, this little troll decided that she needed to go to the bathroom, so she saw a bathroom and she just took off by herself, didn't bother tell anybody she was leaving. I'm standing there crying because my sister was lost at Disneyland, my mother is is wringing her hands, Aunt Marie is patting her on the shoulder, and here comes dad and Uncle Orb, and my father is beating this child with every step. Don't whack you, whack, ever whack, run, whack, and you get you get the idea. So, yeah, just another happy day. From there, we went to Knott's Berry Farm, um, which is kind of a hillbilly version of Disney World, and my family was much more comfortable there. My mother actually rode the log ride. She screamed from the moment she got in the log until the moment it pulled back up. I think she was still screaming five minutes later. Um, but I remember I took a picture with my Mark, my cousin Mark, my favorite cousin, um, sitting on a bench out in front of some saloon with a bunch of like carved wooden hillbilly men holding jugs of moonshine. They weren't real people, they were just carvings. But uh, I thought I was being very continental because I was posing with uh these country gentlemen who were, you know, drinking alcohol. I thought that made me very grown up at five years old. Um and that is the only real family vacation I ever thought that we had. Um but you know, as a Generation X child, we had our own version of summer. And I know you've seen all of the memes about it. You leave the house and your parents don't know what's going on until the street lights come on and you ride your bicycle around, you drink from a garden water hose. Can you say brain-eating amoebas? But we had uh Angie and I just ran all over our neighborhood, but we had two dogs. We had two tiny teacup poodles. We had a black one named Poochie and an apricot one named Jocko, which is the meanest dog I have ever seen in my life. Well, Angie got the bright idea. Did I mention she was three at the time? That let's walk the doggies around the block. Well, we weren't supposed to leave the yard. I said, All right, go in, ask Mom if we can walk the dogs around the block, and then come back and we'll take it from there. Well, so she went in the house, she came back, she said, Yeah, mom says it's fine. Spoiler alert, mom didn't say it was fine. So here I am, I've got my sister and she's got a dog on a leash, and I've got a dog on a leash, and we're big kids, and we're walking these dogs around the block, and you know, sitting back looking at it in my memories, I'm thinking, you know, those dogs had to know something was going on. They should have kept us out of trouble, but no. So we walked around the block and we're coming back up the street, go which run right into our driveway, and we see my mom and one of her friends standing in the driveway, livid. I could smell the smoke. And she grabbed me by the arm and started wailing on me, and her friend grabbed Angie and wailing on her, and I had no idea what was frickin' going on. And you know, I took that beating for that girl, and I I said, Angie told me you said it was okay. That child lied. She lied, and I took the beating for it. I'm yeah, I'm still a little salty about that. Well, later on, um, my parents eventually uh their marriage ended. They had a fundamental difference of opinion. My mom thought he should quit sleeping with half of Bryan County, and he didn't see it that way. So the marriage dissolved, and we moved out and had our best Anne Romano One Day at a time uh bachelorette lives in a in an apartment. Well, one summer my mother and her best friend Gail Arthur, I loved this woman so much. She had uh she had two daughters, Kim and Debbie. Debbie was a teenager, Debbie could drive. Debbie smoked. Uh, she snuck in at local clubs. She was the coolest person ever. She wore bell bottom pants and listened to Heart and Boston. This was like 1976, 77, something like that. Um, and then she had another daughter who was just in between Angie and I, and her name was Kim, so she hung around with us a lot. Well, my mother and Miss Gail decided they were gonna go camping. I am not an outdoor dog. My idea of camping and roughing it is staying in a hotel where I have to carry my own bags. That's as rough as I want to get. But my mother got the idea we're gonna go camping at the lake, girls. So they uh they borrowed a one of those fold-up pop-up trailer tent things and hooked it onto the back of her 1976 Ford Thunderbird lipstick read the whole nine yards. They hooked it up to that and hauled it out to uh Lake Texoma campsite, set it up, and after the camp was set up, I'm looking going, now what do we do? Well, you just go have fun. What do what do we what do you what do what do we mean? What do we do? Well, there's a lake, go swimming in it. It's like, oh, that water's dirty. I don't think so. Well, um, go on a hike. It's like on purpose, no. Don't don't we have a car? Can we go somewhere? Nope, nope. Um go sun yourself. I am a precocious 14-year-old at this point, and I'm saying, skin cancer. Well, I I don't like being hot and I don't like being dirty. So I just kind of hung around the campsite in the shade and read my books and got my journal out. And children, I was emo before emo was emo. I would spend a lot of time staring out at the lake in the sunset and trying to capture this the sunset with this uh box of oil pastels, and I had no idea what I was doing. But I came back and I went to the table and I went to grab a cup of water, and Angie handed me a cup of water, and I tipped it up and took a big old drink, and then I looked down my nose into that cup, and there was a frickin' fish in it. It was like a little minnow she'd caught the lake, and she handed it to me. Let's see if she'll drink it. Guess what? I drank it, and it was nasty. And then later on, I had an upset stomach, and my mother said, Here, take some alka seltzer. Guess what? It tasted just like the fish water. I still won't take alka seltzer to this day. It was gross. But then as we slowly progressed into adulthood, and Angie got married, and I got married, and we we we started our grown-up lives. We had one more big trip with my mom. I I think it was for my 25th birthday, but I'm not exactly sure. She my mother got this hare-brained idea. She just bought herself her first brand new car in a long time. She bought herself a Hyundai. This was the first line of Hyundai's that came out. This was one of the smallest cars I had ever seen. It was, I mean, and this from a woman who like drove a fiat for a while. This this car looked tiny to me. We got this harebrained scheme, and my sister and my mother and myself got into this Hyundai and we took off to Los Angeles. We were gonna go do Disney World again, and we were gonna do it just us. We're gonna do it right this time. So here we are. Did I mention it was in the last week of June, first week of July? Taken off across the desert. Now, my mother is not down with the mountains. Driving along one of those mountainous roads, she would have panic attacks. So she decided that we were going to take off from Fort Worth and travel up along the Mexican border to LA instead of going up through Colorado. We had a couple of very interesting lunches at different roadside stands that spoke no English at all. The food was amazing. But I was really worried that something would come out of my mother and sister's mouth that was gonna like make me wind up. Oh, how can I put this? In jail or dead? But no, they behaved themselves, and we eventually got to Los Angeles. Mom was gonna meet up with one of her friends there. We were gonna hang out there, and then we're gonna go to Disney World, and then we were gonna go up to Las Vegas. So we get to Los Angeles and we check into a best western. My mother, for some unknown reason, is like uh she she loved a good best western. Maybe it was because they had their own personalized ashtrays. I don't know, but it was a best western. We got there, we unpacked the car and opened up this motel room, and it looked like something you would see in an old Columbo episode. The carpet would crunch under your feet as you walked toward the bed. And when you got closer to the bed, it got sticky. The bed had places you could stick quarters, you know, that magic finger you put the quarters in and it would shake. Well, that for Angie started digging through her purse, going, I need quarters, oh god, no, no, no, child. Well, we checked the covers, pulled the covers back, and there was a hair all over the mattress. So my mother we picked up and we just we left. We just turned around and walked up and went and found a Ramada down the street that was a lot better. And by a lot better, I mean the carpet didn't crunch and the uh the beds didn't have magic fingers. So we hung around in in uh San Diego with my mother's friend for a little bit, went down to the pier and and had some really good seafood, and then we then we went to Disney World and we had a lovely time. My mother, one of her catchphrases was, isn't this fun? Aren't we having fun? That uh, and we heard that a lot while we were at Disney World. Isn't this fun? Aren't we having fun? I I still don't remember if she was saying that just because she was joyous that she was having a good time or she was looking for validation. Uh, but it became a running joke in the family. As a matter of fact, um at my mother's funeral, my daughter put her arm around my shoulder and pulled me close after after I gave her eulogy and whispered in my ear, Isn't this fun? Aren't we having fun? My daughter's such a smart ass. I love her. But we went and did the Disney World, and it it was it was really nice. I've got some wonderful pictures. I think my favorite is Angie with her mouse ears and her weird striped shorts, and she's chasing Pinocchio and Geppetto for some reason. I still don't know why. Unfortunately, at this point, I don't think I ever will, but I'll make something up. So from there we went from there to Vegas. Well, my mother had this brilliant idea. Um, let's sleep during the hot part of the day. Did I mention this was the last week of June? So we rolled into Vegas and we looked up and it was 107 degrees. Oh, but it's a dry heat. Yeah, so is a convection oven, okay? No, thank you, ma'am. So we we checked into the best western that we didn't stay on the strip, we didn't stay at uh downtown, we stayed off the strip at a best western. So we pulled in there, mom said, So let's let's sleep at during the day and go out at night. And I thought, oh heck yeah, party time. Sounded good. So we got there, we unpacked the room, and we went down for a nap. Got up about 11 p.m. and went. And first place we hit, my mom says, We've got to go to this place. They have like shrimp cocktail for a buck and a half and steaks for two bucks. And so we went to a place called, I think, the Golden Horseshoe. We went to the Golden Horseshoe downtown, and it was 11:30 at night, and there was nobody in the whole restaurant except for a a half-circle booth at the very back, and there were three large dark-haired men wearing black suits talking in hushed voices. And I thought to myself, we just walked into a mob meeting. They're like sitting there having some some chicken fried steaks and talking about who they're gonna whack next. Well, guess where my mother sat? She sat in the booth right next to them, whole freaking restaurant to choose from. And my mother lets us, let's go sit right next to the sopranos. Woo-hoo! Isn't this fun? Are we having fun? So I couldn't keep get my mom to keep her voice down. And eventually, about five minutes after we got there, the the gentleman next to us got up and walked out. And then I explained to my mom, you notice anything about those men? She goes, Oh, yes, they're very handsome, and don't they look nice in their suits? I'm going, Mom, gentlemen, black suits in Vegas at 11 o'clock at night, just drinking coffee. These are not businessmen, not that kind of businessmen. Well, she finally got it, but she went, Well, I bet they were very, very nice anyway. Bless her heart. So we we we got our $2 steak and our dollar fifty um shrimp cocktail. Then we got up and we just started walking around downtown. Now, downtown Las Vegas in the 70s. No, this would have been the 80s. Yeah, yeah, this was in the 80s. Well, it wasn't the free month experience that it is now, it was a bit rough. So the first thing we did is we went to a casino. Oh, my mother, nickel slots. That was her thing. She she always wanted to play the nickel slots, and I was I was committing heresy because I I I played the quarter slots. You're just throwing away money. I'm going to Vegas. That's what you do here. So my mother's playing her nickel slots and stuff like that. And um, so we're walking down the street, and this woman from there's there's like no no fronts on these buildings, it's just like open to the air. Air conditioner's blowing. Big fan of air conditioning. And this Asian lady yelled at it, mom, You want to win big? My mother just sacheted over and said, Yes, I would like to win big. She goes, Give me $20. And my mother goes, The hell you say, I'm not giving you $20. And she turned around and stomped off. I'm going, Mom, I I don't think you get it, but that's okay. You you got your little bucket of of nickels there and just having a good time. It was uh it was an interesting trip. We never I never actually got to see the strip on that that trip. My mother just liked the the little casinos that had her nickel slots, and that's really all she wanted to see. We didn't go to any shows, um, we didn't really go to any sightseeing. And um that was that was the last big summer trip that we got to take with my mom and sister. Years later, there was another trip that wasn't in the summer uh involving my mom and my sister, but that's a story for another day.