Emma is the only one living at home right now, which would make for a pretty ill-attended movie marathon, so I did something unprecedented: I told her she could invite some friends.
Then Sariah told us that she would be driving back from Cedar City for the weekend for the movie marathon (ah, the strength of tradition!). So I said, Okay, you can invite friends too. I then limited it to three invitees apiece, so that (a) we wouldn’t overload our living room, and (b) we wouldn’t go down in infamy as the Shumate Superspreader Event.
And then Jason said that he would be foregoing parties to come to the marathon. (He wouldn’t be inviting friends.) Alex stayed home, because he’s too old for such things.
So we crafted a movie list largely composed of favorites from prior years — movies that my daughters wanted to show to (inflict upon) others.
Then on Friday, the day of the marathon, there was an urgent Zoom call with parents of students in the high school production of Footloose!, in which Emma is a cast member. They’ve been as cautious as they can be all through rehearsals, but they had crossed an infection line with cast members, and so they were quarantining all cast members for a week. (Oddly enough, on Monday the school will be movie from a hybrid two-days-a-week schedule to a four-day schedule, which Emma wasn’t happy about, mainly because she would have to wake up before noon four days in a row; now she gets to spend the week all online, and she’s thrilled!) The school officials couldn’t say who tested positive, or even how many positives they were, but they did say that other cast members who were in close association with positives (dance partners, etc.) would be contacted directly. Emma wasn’t contacted, so she’s not a direct risk, but…
So with Emma in technical quarantine, no friends! But the show must go on!
We started with Ghostbusters (1984), because both Sariah and Emma had had at least one friend invited who really doesn’t like anything scary and probably wouldn’t stay through the whole marathon anyway. And you never know if kids these days have been educated in the classics by their parents. (I told the girls: “I’m going to ask if anyone has not seen Ghostbusters. And if anyone asks, ‘Which one?’, I will invite them politely but firmly to leave.”)
We then went to Teen Wolf (1985), Michele’s suggestion for a non-scary movie. The girls had at least seen parts of it at other times, but they didn’t mind because they enjoy Michael J. Fox; plus it gave more opportunities to point out ’80s fashion — the high school’s Footloose production is going all-in on ’80s costuming, and so we’ve been inculcating Emma in the era’s finest fashion motifs.
Then was The Gate (1987), a repeat fave (and more ’80s fashion!). I stopped the movie in the middle to explain how John Keats’ conception of the “objective correlative” in poetry was reflected in the protagonist’s use of the toy rocket and launcher, comprised of gifts between the protagonist and his sister, as a weapon against the Boss Demon. An English degree just gives and gives, folks.
(Jason went home after that.)
The other repeats we had on the schedule were ones specifically chosen for the benefit of first-time watchers — who wants to watch Troll 2 without fresh meat? — so I started looking through my Prime video list. That’s how we settled on X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes (1963), which the girls had never seen. And of course, I followed the sudden final image with the probably apocryphal tale of the cut final line that came thereafter.
And then Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007). Strange to confess, I had never seen any iteration of the story except for a ten-minute sketch by Canadian comedians Wayne & Shuster on TV back in the ’70s. About halfway through we all admitted that we were enduring rather than enjoying; a Stephen Sondheim musical; turned into a movie by Tim Burton can’t be anything less than hideously overwrought. So the movie marathon ended at 3:30 am, with the final feature unfinished.