And now, the letter V

V

Wow.  Just saying it sends shivers down my spine.  I get flashbacks to that Kevin Bacon-looking guy Donovan (Marc Singer) and his full season of hokey near-misses against the Visitors from the TV series called, simply: V.  I still have a very hard time trusting brunettes named Diana.

I can hear the PEW PEW sound effects in my head right now and I can quite vividly remember the terror I experienced at the thought of the alien brain-torture setup that they put on, whats-her-name...  Julie.  I remember the red and black space suits and the boxy white space ships and those crazy alien voices.

Goosebumps, kids.  I'm talking major goosebumps over here.  It was a  really influential show for little me.  I was what...  seven?  At that time my TV diet consisted of the Addams Family reruns, PBS telethons, Masterpiece Theater and the A Team.   Mix in the old Battlestar Galactica and a few foggy memories of my earliest exposures to Star Wars and E.T. ... and I start making a lot more sense in this world.

Then came Red Dawn.  That one still keeps me up at night.  No foolin'.  Screw the remake, the original...  when she took that grenade?  Jeebus.  Still have a hard time dealing with that.

Of course life had its menu of difficulties for me to deal with in reality, but I was really REALLY good at escapism.  This was the kind of material that I fed on.  When it wasn't being poured into my eyes or ears, and when my brother wasn't sewing together some impossibly alarming series of stories to annoy me with, I was left to my own devices and my own (by then) over-fertile imagination.

And so my path of telling stories and having nightmares and telling better stories began.

Now, be advised, amidst all of this black and white horror and rubber-suited monster-bashing I really did have a knack for paying attention to the happy stuff.  I could (and still can) glue a silver lining to just about anything.  To a fault, really.

I wasn't really tuned into the whole "zombies are gross" fun of it all.  I was more plugged into the outright horror of "holy shit aliens are everywhere and they can get into anything I can".  My energy focus was/is less on the "oh gee, that was a great scare"... team ME goes for the "well shit, sister, you're not smart enough to get out of THAT mess".

But of course, now I'm a lot smarter and those twelve year old paranoid imaginings hold far less sway over my daily life.

Other movies I've loved (you'll see them listed over there on the left...) have had similar appeal.  Horrifying situations that required brains and mettle...  two things I've often found myself miserably short of.  Though, I'm happy to admit, I've gotten better with both with the passage of time.
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And now, in  honor of old letter V here's something from me to you, my adoring throng.  V is also the number 5.  So please tell me your answers to the following five questions.  Let's get to know each other a little better, shall we?

I)  What was one of your most trans-formative movies or t.v. shows from when you were a kid?
II)  What is scarier to you:  Ghosts, Zombies or Aliens.  and why?
III)  In 10-ish words, what's the best advice/mantra you've ever heard?
IV)  What is/are the most prominent color/s in the room you're in right now?
V)  What was the very first food item you ate today?  (coffee and drinks don't count)

---  hit it!