dearlenbaugh wrote:
Oct. 11, 1963.  Tonight's episode was called "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet". ...

So, cut to late in the episode: My sister is asleep on the couch behind me; I'm sitting Indian Native-American-style on the floor with a big bowl of now-forgotten potato chips, tensely leaning forward as Shatner reaches for the curtain covering the airplane window.

Donna opens her eyes just in time to see The Gremlin revealed, and SHRIEKS!!

Electricity shoots through me -- I scream and convulse, the potato chips go airborne!

My scream startles Donna and she screams again!

Her scream startles me and I scream again!

This could have continued well into Alfred Hitchcock, but my little nephew came running out of his bedroom crying because all the howling woke him.

Great story, wonderfully told.  I can picture the potato chips being ground into the carpet in the chaos.  And posted on the 50th anniversary day--that's a treat.   I treasure using these Time Capsules as a chance to reach back in memory, to very tangible and specific things like individual  comics, or shows or records, or places or events, and to pull those memories into the present day, and I really enjoy the shared memories of other folks on this board.  

To use a comic book analogy:  Even if your favorite character from the Silver Age got turned into a transvestite mass murderer from an alien dimension in the 1980s, the original books you loved are still there to read.  And even if an additional years of living on this planet have subjected us to any of the indignities of the aging process, large or small, somehow fixed in memory there is still a first moment when William Shatner sees the gremlin on the wing, your sister is screaming, the potato chips are floating in the air....and it's a place you can still go back and visit.

As we grow older, the world becomes stranger,
The pattern more complicated of dead and living;
Not the intense moment, isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment;
And not the lifetime of one man only,
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
— T.S. Eliot, “Four Quartets (East Coker)”

Last Edited By: Yossarian Oct 13 13 8:54 AM. Edited 1 times.