Art That Shaped My Life - Uncle Buck

PREFACE
Sometimes while I'm working and have the television running in the background I'll surf through the channels and come across a television show or movie, sometimes a song that magically transports me to another place and time. It isn't the memories that come flooding back that have me so mesmerized as the realization that in some instances the moments spent watching or listening somehow have etched not just my memory but my personality, my passions, my dreams. Imagine that - how an art like music and "theater" can shape who a person becomes...

Uncle Buck - I was in junior high school the night my mother planned to take a house full of my friends to the movies. We were stationed in Pattonville Military Base in Germany and my father was away at a school at Virginia Beach stateside.

As we were walking out, my father's First Sergeant and the Chaplain met us at the front door.

My memory of my mother that day is one that I will never forget.

She was fearless, calm, determined.

I remember the Sergeant starting with, "Mrs. Vazquez..." and my mother cutting him off saying,

"Is he alive?"

He responded that my father was stable, suffered from a heart attack and that they wanted for her to fly to be with him while in recovery.

She grabbed her purse, ushered the men towards the door and continued,

"GREAT! He's on the beach! I have the kids, the pets, the bills, in a country half way around the world without my family and he's the one having a heart attack?! We'll have to take care of this later; I'm taking my kids and their friends to the movies!"

She herded the growing crowd of oblivious teenagers down the street trying not to show the potential crisis at hand.

We loudly crowded into several rows of the theater and in the opening scenes of the movie, Uncle Buck is sent to take care of his nieces and nephews when the grandfather has a heart attack!

We roared with laughter at the irony!

From that point on, my family somehow takes center stage in crisis - we shine in emergency rooms and police stations. Nothing is funnier than blood and tears!

And when things are so completely unmanageable, I grab my keys, clutch my purse, get in the car and head to a movie theater where after watching any kind of movie for an hour or two of dark seclusion, you can immerse yourself into another world and another place, surfacing nothing seems so dramatic that can't be dealt with...