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To get to the staff bathrooms in the library where I work, one has to walk through a section of AV that's lined with movie posters. I walked by yesterday and had a collision of several thoughts at once. The first thought was that with our newfound options for babysitting, we'll have a little bit more freedom on the weekends, which means seeing movies once again. The second was a sort of stream-of-consciousness pastiche: "Oh, hey-- that one looks funny!...Oh, hmph, a new Will Ferrell movie-- I'll have to avoid that one...Kevin Bacon's in a new romance?" I was shuffling on my merry way when suddenly, it hit me....by the time a movie is being advertised on the walls of the library, it is far from a new release. These were new...to DVD.

Aghast in horror, I clutched the brass "Staff Only" sign, hand to heaving chest. I was one of "those people"-- one so out of touch with popular culture, I was liable to glance at the Three 6 Mafia on MTV and think "Oh, my...Run DMC is back, and how! Such nice young men." (It's already happening, people. Don't think I just knew that the Three 6 Mafia has one of the top-selling rap albums this week. I totally had to open I-Tunes and research it. Now leave me to my Burt Bacharach.)

This isn't the only time in my life I've experienced a sort of disconcerting movie black-out. All throughout elementary and middle school, when my peers' parents let them see Dirty Dancing and Pretty Woman in giggling groups in the theater, my movie experiences were relegated to the new Disney flick or the Lugar family's slides of the Holy Land during Lenten suppers at church. If it wasn't rated G, there had to be serious family discussion of the "appropriateness" of the material in the movie. Language and violence might be negotiable, but anything approaching flirting, innuendo, or the three letter word whose letters (E-X-S) I'll leave you to unscramble was a solid and unequivocal NO.

In our family, "G" meant "Great!" Until I was 10 or 11, "PG" meant parental guidance as far from the theater as they could get me, and PG-13 was an unholy land of lewd looks, exposed breasts, and unnatural acts with pack animals. "R" might as well have been "X." It didn't exist. You didn't even mention those movies. And when Bill O'Reilly brought them up on Inside Edition, you had better scoot your little butt into the kitchen for another helping of Rice-A-Roni, because his very mention of them in your presence would be your fault, you track-marked middle-school heroin dealer. For shame!

This led to a certain amount of awkwardness in many of my social dealings, most predominantly at sleepovers. I distinctly remember the giggles when I called home once to ask permission to watch Dallas, which I know is a TV show but was almost certainly not allowed and came on after my bedtime. Another time I spent a lonely couple of hours in a friend's empty rec room, listening to the shrieks of delight and terror from upstairs as my cohorts watched Hellraiser from a pile on the couch. Trying to ignore the sneaking suspicion that I was destroying my hopes for being accepted into the group later in the evening, I anxiously paced the carpeted floor, mapping out what would most likely be the "coolest" spot to lay out my sleeping bag. I woke up a couple of hours later an island under the pool table, while everyone else set up camp near the Mrs. Pacman machine and scared each other into the wee hours of the morning.


The bright side of this unfamiliarity with nearly every movie made between 1988 and 1995 was that by the time I reached high school and had embraced doing pretty much the opposite of whatever my parents wanted me to do, I was the perfect friend to have over to watch Better Off Dead or One Crazy Summer or Tombstone or whatever semi-soft core porn was on USA's "Up All Night." "You mean you actually haven't seen Silence of the Lambs?" they would squeal, and before I knew it, I was given the place of honor in the squishy bean bag chair for a movie marathon beginning with Clarice Starling.

And while I've moved far beyond the time when someone will french-braid my hair while we paint our nails and watch The Love Guru or the Sex and the City movie, I can look forward to adding everything I'm missing to my Netflix cue and piling on my own couch to watch them with my husband. Movie black-outs, I've come to realize, can be a very good thing...especially when Will Ferrell is in the process of clogging up the Box Office with a stupid movie about every major sport. Somebody wake me up when he does ice fishing.