Same Time, Next Year

I have a few favourite movies that I have recently been able to purchase on DVD.  I was thrilled to find them after all these years and, mainly, because I thought - when my kids are old enough (particularly my daughter), I would love to sit down with them and re-watch these old films that inspired me in childhood.

When I was about 8 I was home sick in my mother's bed and she had a massive old telly in her room that was a luxury to be able to watch.  I used to watch Sesame Street in there every morning and afternoon, but I sat on the floor at the foot of her bed.  But when I was sick, I could lie under the covers and watch the midday movie on Channel 7.  The telly was black and white but, so too were most of the movies.  I will never forget that day when I was 8 as I was mesmerised by Tennessee Williams' play, The Glass Menagerie, produced for the screen with Jane Wyman and, it could have been, Spencer Tracy as Jim.  Watching it formed that part of me that grew to love reading and writing and literature and art - but I particularly was intrigued and moved by the lilting and sensitive narrative style and structure of the play.  It made sense to me.  It was like music.  I understood it implicitly and internally as though it was as natural as life itself.

I had a similar experience with another play made for film entitled Same Time, Next Year with Alan Alder and Ellyn Bursten.  Have you heard of it?  It's about a man and a woman who are both happily married to other people, who meet and, through circumstance, fall in love and choose to meet on the same weekend for one night every year.  It doesn't sound like a story for a little girl (I think I was about 11 when I saw this one) but its beauty and simplicity lies in the innocence and sweetness of their relationship and how they come, ironically, to love each other's spouses and children without ever having met them.  I weep and laugh whenever I see it again.

There were many other films that I wanted to watch and share with my children - ones as obscure as Charles Bronson's From Noon 'Til Three (which I possibly broke the world record for watching more times than any other person on the face of the earth!) and Clint Eastwood's Bronco Billy (ditto).  Star Trek 4: The Return Home was also high on my list of 'must-sees' with my children,(especially when I was a self-confessed greenie - it's all about the whales, you see...).  But the opportunity arose to watch Same Time, Next Year with my girl last Saturday night.

She didn't want to.  She would much rather have watched repeats of How I Met Your Mother, but I put my whiny, guilt-inducing, cow-eyed foot down and she, reluctantly, gave in.

We weren't off to the best start and, I'm here to tell you, it didn't get better.

She didn't get the characters, the narrative, the humour or the dialogue (she studies high level English).  She didn't get the historical references (she studies high level History) and she was asking when it was going to end way before the climactic scene and sweet, heart-warming ending.

Really what happened was that I lost a little bit of my heart that night.  I had to grow up fast!  I had to come to terms with the fact that my girl is nothing like me and doesn't have to be.  As much as I'd like a little clone of me walking around the house and coo-ing over the same things, it's not going to happen.  And nor should it.  She is her own self: a driven, slightly mad, obsessive, over-achieving, mathematically-minded, sports-crazy, overly-sensitive perfectionist.

Tomorrow I have my old friend Linda coming over for lunch and guess what I am popping on the box?  You guessed it.  I reckon the movie might go down a treat for a lovely lady in her fifties.  Just not with my daughter.

I'll try Bronco Billy next week...I used to know the dialogue by heart.  I won't hold my breath that she'll be as enamoured.