Yay for collages! Yay for the summer of ’92! Yay for this new article, which I am now reading as a reward for coming home from work and doing….work. (I tutor tomorrow)Thanks, Matt.

Chestnuts roasted by Muppet Baby @ 07/25/2007 12:22 AM

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Funny, I’m the oldest but there aren’t many me-centric snaps lying around either. I even wondering if I might have been adopted as a package deal with my little sister, who there were plenty of baby pics of.

Chestnuts roasted by squee4242 @ 07/25/2007 12:23 AM

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I don’t remember what I did the summer of 92. I guess I would have been 9 years old, though, so I probably played a lot of video games, ran around outside with friends, etc.

I miss those days.

Chestnuts roasted by Cameron T. @ 07/25/2007 12:26 AM

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That’s the problem with being a younger child. They take fewer pics the later the kid. You can find half a dozen headshots of your oldest brother/sister at the top of the family photo bin, but only a handful of yourself in the whole thing.

Chestnuts roasted by Hoverbored @ 07/25/2007 12:29 AM

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those stick figures sure are contented with that rocket.

Chestnuts roasted by dohopoki @ 07/25/2007 12:33 AM

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In the summer of ’92, my mom took my brother, 2 cousins and myself to see “Wayne’s World” at the drive-in, bless her heart. While we laughed and laughed at the hilarious characters and witty dialogue, my mom HATED it.
She hated it so much that she started the engine and started to drive away when they were still doing the many endings! We were screaming “NO MOM- Its not done yet!” and she really didn’t care.

As I recall, we jumped out of the slow moving car to make her stay for until the REAL ending played…then for the funny stuff during the credits. Poor Mom.

Chestnuts roasted by Muppet Baby @ 07/25/2007 12:42 AM

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Wow. Very Cool. I think there’s something about mothers who are in their 50s and 60s and getting rid of the things their kids left beind. My mother does the same thing. Each month she mails a box to me and my two sisters and the boxes are filled with random things from our childhood. The old school papers from elementary school are cute and all, but the things I had stashed away from jr high and high school are the best.
I was between 7th and 8th grade that summer, I think I spent the majority of it at The Wave pool, which was the only public pool in our area. And we rollerbladed in our neon rollerblades everywhere listening to cassettes in our walkmans.

Chestnuts roasted by kb @ 07/25/2007 12:46 AM

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Man, you were such a cool kid. I had to bust out the Google Maps on this one so I could really get a feel for your summer locales.
Are you talking about those naked afro lady paintings?
I would KILL to hear your Godfather impression. It would be so awesome if those recordings turned out not to be lost to time.
My grandparents live right by the Liberace museum. I haven’t been. None of my obsessions help me bang hot chicks, either.

Chestnuts roasted by squee4242 @ 07/25/2007 12:56 AM

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Muppet Baby — Your comment totally reawakened an old movie memory from way back. I remember going to a movie near Christmas of ’91–I think it was Hook, but it may well have been something else my parents took me to because I couldn’t convince them to see Bis Ans Ende Der Weldt–at The Greatest Theater Ever. Walking out of the movie, we had to pass by this gigantic standee of Wayne and Garth’s heads, both wagging back and forth on a mechanical piston.

The first thing I thought was that they were married, and that Garth was one weird-looking girl. Then we got Comedy Central that summer, and I became completely addicted to SNL. I insisted we go see the movie, and get the soundtrack, and let me listen to “Sicamicadico” over and over again until my parents went nuts. Of course, they didn’t realize it at the time, but they had just turned me into a rocker, comedian, and royal pain-in-the-ass.

Actually, most of my personal and professional choices could be traced back to that one giant cardboard ad, so it’s weird that I hadn’t thought about it in probably a decade.

Chestnuts roasted by Declan Dempsey @ 07/25/2007 1:06 AM

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Hey Matt,

Great article. Every time you write something like this I am reminded of just why I feel compelled to read this site, near daily. There were at least four or five moments during this entry where I literally shook my head in disbelief because I could not understand how someone else could have had the exact same thoughts I did when I was a kid.

I know we aren’t the only ones to think this way, but I haven’t found anyone (on the internet) that can put it into words better than you.

Honestly, thanks for reminding what it was to be a kid. All of those silly things we did then that now seem pointless… but at the same time we feel a little sad that we don’t feel the same magic any longer.

Jesus, now I am feeling like I really want to have kids of my own soon. Please lord, don’t let my girlfriend read this. She has been begging for a ring/kids for two years now.

Again, thanks, for publishing the best site on the ‘net. Sincerely.

Ahh, who am I kidding? My lady has been wanting to get hitched/have kids since 2003. I just thought writing that earlier sounded pathetic (on my part). But I guess this is a place for being honest, right?

Chestnuts roasted by Magic Toy @ 07/25/2007 1:20 AM

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The summer of ’92 was the first summer I spent almost completely without parental supervision. My mother was pregnant with my little brother and spent the summer working as a hostess at a local restaurant or off her feet when she was at home; my stepfather, a commercial fisherman, spent it at sea, earning money to feed the new member of the family and the three already existing. This left my two sisters and I on our own for practically two months.

The most memorable incident that summer was when my sister got a hankering for barbecue. Stepdad was out on the ocean again and he’s the main grill person in our family, so she decided to do it herself. How hard could it be? In the end, she almost set the house on fire, thanks to forgetting to pull the damn barbecue away from the side near the porch. I don’t remember if our folks ever found out about that one; I’m hoping for her sake they didn’t.

That was also the summer our diets went to hell. With Mom and Dad gone every day, we were free to eat whatever we pleased, which means whatever pleased 13, 12, and almost 8-year-olds. We got really intimate with the Domino’s Pizza across the street from the house we lived in then, and we declared by the end of the summer we never wanted to see another hot dog as long as we lived.

Then there was the day my parents went “up the road” (in South Jersey speak) to Point Pleasant and took our littlest sister with them, leaving my other sister, our pals, and me to eat pizza, watch “R” rated movies, and mess around with the furniture.

Chestnuts roasted by starwenn @ 07/25/2007 1:25 AM

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Haven’t read the article yet, but I do congratulate you on going over a month without missing an update… Unless the software ate the 24th’s entry.

Chestnuts roasted by DocDragon @ 07/25/2007 1:38 AM

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Yeah, the fine art of filming high quality movies with a VHS camcorder in the early ’90s. What can I say? I’ve been there.

At first I dabbled in stop motion animation. I was first inspired by an episode of Muppet Babies where the, ummm, muppet babies decide to film their own cartoons. I recall the fastened their camera to the extended ladder of a firetruck toy, and used that to snap their images.

My first movie was a battle between He-Man figures Skeletor and Zodac. It was filmed to be somewhat of a “showdown at high noon”, even though I wasn’t crazy about westerns growing up. (Thanks Dad!) They each took three paces towards each other and then drew the weapons and fired. Of course the weapons were forged from Play-doh since the actual accessories had been lost long before. The first figure fired, complete with a red play-doh muzzle-blast, but missed. The second figured returned fire and scored a direct hit. The face of the second figure was wrapped in a burst of red play-doh, which I can only assume was meant to represent blood and brain matter. They fell lifeless to the coffee table battlefield. How insulting to lay dead next to a copy of COUNTRY LIVING magazine. Take that you evil bastard.

Another “movie” I can remember filming was a horror offering. I can recall being disappointed early in the production due to our limited budget. In the opening scene the main character, played by my friend Chris, walked towards an oven to cook a frozen pizza. In the first shot he unwraps the pizza from its wrapper and places it on the cookie sheet. Quickly I realized I didn’t like the shot because he had looked at the camera. Damn. How can I be expected to work like this? Soon after I realized he had already unwrapped our only frozen pizza and there was no way to repeat the shot. The pizza was now thawing rapidly and no longer in its factory “seal”. I’ll be damned if I had another three dollars to buy another or the motivation to bike a half mile to the store to get a replacement pie.

Picture me freaking out as a twelve year old, ala Billy Walsh from Entourage, in my parent’s kitchen on a random afternoon in mid-July.

The film was shut down soon thereafter. I wasn’t willing to work under those CONDITIONS!

My film career was rekindled a few years later, as a freshman in high school, when I played the lead in our CEREAL KILLER movie. I was a psycho who slept in a dog cage, ate cereal (obviously), and picked random victims out of the phone book. Strangely enough I always turned the page to the actual name of another kid we knew.

Those were the days.

Chestnuts roasted by Magic Toy @ 07/25/2007 1:49 AM

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