Death By Christmas Robot

There are certain things that are a standard part of the christmas holiday. These things can vary from person to person and may even change over time. Decorating the christmas tree, stringing lights on the house, baking christmas cookies, eating christmas cookies, listening to old christmas music, etc.

Some standards are regional, for instance I grew up in a small town in south Arkansas. Each year in El Dorado the local television station KTVE would sting lights from it’s TV tower that when lit would appear to be a giant christmas tree that could be seen from many many miles away. Every year our family would all pile in the car to drive under the giant christmas tree. As a teeneager I figured out a way to get to the roof of the TV station which gave me access to the tower. I climbed up the tower with my video camera and filmed cars driving under the tree and the city thru the lights of the tree. The next year my friends and I staged operation “lights out on christmas” in which we may or may not have developed a plan to pull the plug on the entire GIANT christmas tree. If such a plan did exist and was implemented it would have involved some climbing, a planned escape path thru backyards over fences and a get-away car. I can neither confirm nor deny this.

Another one of my christmas standards as a child was the church christmas play. Every year…...every single year….no matter who died….no matter if the entire town was in quarantine from an outbreak of rabid fleas, the show must go on! In fact my mother who was always the director is on this very day in the middle of yet another church christmas play. She surely should get an award for longest running director of the church christmas play. Somebody give that lady an award.

So if you’ve never had the privilege of being a part of a christmas play in a small church in a small town then you would never know that shepherds in the bible wore bath towels on their heads, or that if you need some palm trees you only need to dumpster dive the local carpet store because palm trees are actually made of the cardboard core of carpet rolls. You then have probably never heard a narrator nervously reading the christmas story and in all of his country back woods draw say “and there they found the little baby Jesus wrapped in SWAPPING clothes and lying in the MANAGER!”….not manger….manAger!

But not all plays involve shepherds, palm trees and manAgers.

When I was about 10 or 11 years old the theme of the play was telling the christmas story thru the eyes of toys in a toy shop who came to life on the stage. By this time I was pretty aggressive about which part I wanted and then working my tail off to memorize the lines to ensure I landed the part. (I received no special treatment from the director)

That year I had my eyes set on the toy robot. I nailed the auditions, as I had perfected not only the lines but I spoke them with a nice robot mono-tone. I was awarded the part. I convinced the director to let me design and fabricate my own costume. It was over the top and would definitely make this years play bump up a couple notches on the cool scale.

Here is how I made my epic costume. 1 box slightly larger than my head wrapped in alluminum foil, 1 large box also wrapped in foil with a hole in the bottom that fits over my head and rest on my shoulders covering my body down to my knees, four of those cardboard tubes from the carpet rolls for my arms and legs. And then to top it all off I figured it would be cool to have the front of the robots chest have lights that blink just like a real robot. I would poke holes in the box and push about 10 lights thru to create the effect. The only multi colored blinking lights I could find was a strand of 100 christmas lights, but I only needed 10 so I decided I’d take the other 90 lights and just tape them to my chest and then cover them with a black shirt. Brilliant!

So the show begins and all is going great I’m killing it with my robot vocals and I’m feeling great. But about 20 mins into this hour and half show I begin to get really really hot! 90 lights strapped to your chest covered by a shirt and then covered by a box covered in alluminum foil is like…well it's like an OVEN! I had created an oven and then put myself inside to cook. And to make matters worse I couldn’t bend my arms or my legs because they were constrained by the rigid cardboard tubes. The circulation was being cut off of both my legs and arms….I couldn’t feel my toes or fingers and my head is in a small box that only has 3 small holes and 1 large whole. The large hole is connected to the inferno of hell below!! So I’m getting almost ZERO fresh air. After 45 mins I realize I’m not gonna make it to the end of this horrible story. I thought “I must get air….I must get air!”  But I couldn’t move my arms to remove the box from my head….I was just gonna die in this robot oven. Then as if my processor was rebooted I suddenly had a plan, I could bend my hips a little and if I bent over enough I might could get this box off of my head. I began bending over and at the same time I started violently shaking my head back and forth. It took a couple of tries but finally the box went flying across the stage! 

FREE…..FREE….I breathed in that fresh air like a boy saved from a burning furnace robot. I was gonna be ok….I was gonna live! And that’s when I saw Raggedy Anne had hopped up and fetched my head from across the stage…..and while singing “Go Tell it on the Mountain!” she made her way over to me. She was bringing my head back and was about to lock me back into this robot prison! I started screaming from the top of my lungs “NOOOOO Don’t put that back on my head!!! NOOOOO!” but my voice was drowned out by the choirs of angels singing “Go Tell IT!!”

From the audiences perspective they were probably thinking "Wow this play has many cool nuances...the robot is so excited about the birth of Jesus that his head pops off, and just like Jesus little Raggedy Ann restored him."

I immediately bent over again and violently shook my head until the box came flying off again. And again I breathed the fresh air….but again to my dismay faithful Raggedy Ann retrieved my head and plopped it right back down over my face as I’m screaming “NOOOOOOO I can’t breathe!!!!”

The third time I ejected my head my parents realized that something was wrong and began sprinting to the stage just in time for me to turn to a very large potted tree and there I puked all the complementary cookies and koolaid I had just consumed proir to the show.

So every year when I crack open the christmas lights I hear in my ear a little robot saying "MUST GET AIR!!"

Memphis

Memphis

When I was roughly 9 or 10 years old my dad announced that we were going to take a vacation to Memphis. We didn't take many "normal" vacations in my family. My dad was a pastor of a church and so once a year we went to a large national conference for the organization he was a member of.  A lot of our vacations were these combo vacations traveling to the national conference. Because of this I was able to visit a number of large cities, which was cool. We never flew but rather drove, so I would also get to see several states on our way. As a kid we drove to or thru California, Arizona, New Mexico, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Colorado, Utah, New York, all states that border Arkansas as well as Tijuana, Mexico.

As a kid I was excited to see a Zebra in Tijuana….turns out it was a DONKEY!

So on occasion we would take what I would as a 10 year old call "normal" vacations.

Anytime in my family that we were leaving town it would be announced that we were leaving on a certain date. I always assumed that meant we would get up early that morning, pack the car, drive thru McDonalds for some breakfast, stop for gas and be on our way out of town by 8am, or 10am the latest. But often I would be awake, packed and waiting to depart and my dad would finish his morning coffee and paper and he'd say to my mom "I'm going to go run a couple of errands, when will you be ready to leave town?" and my mom would say something like "As soon as I do the books (aka pay bills, balance check book), wash some clothes and pack then I'll be ready". I was always let down because this would mean a bit of a delay, but thought surely she can get all that done and be ready by 10 or 11am. For some reason it seemed like it was always late in the afternoon before we actually left.

So somewhere leading up to this vacation my dad had put out this idea of going to Memphis to spend a couple of days. He had given some suggestions of what we might do there.

1. Get a hotel room! (which included swimming at the pool and jumping on the beds and watching cartoons! We didn't own a TV.)  
2. Ride Go-carts! 
3. Go to Liberty Land! (Liberty Land is an amusement park in Memphis with rides, ferris wheel, roller coaster etc. Elvis had a favorite ride there called The Zippin Pippin) 

I can't overstate how excited I was!

One small detail is that my grandparents lived just a little over an hour outside of Memphis and we lived in El Dorado which is in south Arkansas. My parents had also mentioned that they might drive over to my grandparents house after a few days in Memphis. ( I could live with a brief visit to the grandparents after a few days in Memphis.)

So in my 10 year old mind this is how this vacation would work. We leave El Dorado around 9am and that would put us in Little Rock just in time to stop at Casa Bonita for lunch. Who doesn't love eating mexican food in a cave with torches blazing, a monkey riding a unicycle on a wire over your head and unlimited hot sopaipilla's with honey. Plus they had a game room that you could win tickets from and the gypsy fortune teller behind the jail bars (who was way creepy) would exchange those tickets for prizes!

Casa Bonita Cave Eating

Casa Bonita Arcade

Then we'd be off to our destination, MEMPHIS!!

Well as usual we didn't leave until sometime late that afternoon. My brother had just started driving and so as we loaded up it was decided that this would be his first vacation that he would sit behind the wheel.

Shortly after we got on the road my dad began a discussion with my mom. The topic was "should we go to Memphis for a couple days and then go over to the grandparents OR just skip Memphis and go straight to the grandparents?!!!!"

I loved my grandparents and have many fond memories of being at their house, but my grandparents house pales in comparison to hotels, go-carts, amusement parks, and eating at new restaurants! I was appalled and immediately verbally objected and insisted such non sense be silenced at once! I was told to put a lid on it.

We hit the city limits of Little Rock too late to eat lunch at Casa Bonita. I had waited patiently for my parents to realize that the absolutely best plan would be to go straight to Memphis. I had only mentioned it as we passed thru Hampton, Arkansas. Oh and also I mentioned it at Fordyce, Sheridan and as we hit the interstate that would lead us into Little Rock. Each time I was told to be quiet. So now as we rolled into Little Rock it was full court press. My window was closing quickly and my parents were not budging. For some strange reason they had been deceived into choosing to go to my grandparents instead of Memphis. My persistence and reason was quickly met with aggressive resistance and because my brother was driving this allowed my dad to back up his verbal resistance with a very accurate threat of his hand coming from the front seat to convince me. Usually on road trips he was driving and when we pushed his buttons and he became, "FRACTIOUS" (as he called it) his hand would come flying into the back seat and like a blind fox in a chicken coop he would swing away as we flipped and twisted in all effort to dodge the blind fox!

So there I sat….brooding….sulking….scheming….

My brother had never driven in heavy traffic, on an interstate, and having to navigate multiple lane changes and follow those large green directional signs. He had a lot of pressure on him to keep the family safe and keep us on the right highways and in the correct lanes.

As we approached the interchange where Interstate 30 merges with Interstate 40 it meant we were just moments away from the next big interchange, the point where the left two lanes veer off towards grandma's and the right two lanes continue on towards Memphis. Now was the time to ask my dad one last time, "could we please go to Memphis?" He replied, "No…we've already decided, we aren't going to Memphis." Then he instructed my brother to merge into the left lane. As the car settled into the left lane and we approached the exit I felt all of my Memphis dreams slipping thru my hands like sand.

And then it was as if time stood still and I had the most desperate and most amazing feeling pulse thru my veins. I could feel the white dotted line sounding out to me like mission control counting down to launch. This was it….this was the defining moment of my life (or at least this vacation). We had already passed under the giant green directional signs and the dotted line was at T-3……2…….1.

Then the dotted line turned into a solid white line, inside my emotions felt like the rockets had ignited and were beginning to shake everything. The solid white line split in two, and in my head it was if I could hear it crack like a whip. And then like a hot geyser I erupted! There had been silence in the car since I had asked about Memphis just a couple of minutes ago. From the back seat and with everything I had in me I screamed,

"MEM……..PHISSSSSSS!!!!!!"

Like blowing an air horn into a room full of sleeping sailors, my voice shook everyone in the car and instantly caused as much panic as my dad swinging his arm from the front seat. My brother startled and already stressed, pulled hard right on the steering wheel and punched the gas, sending our car bolting across the rumble strips that lie between the now far separated white lines. Cars all around us were swerving, my mom and sister in the back seat with me were screaming, and my dad was yelling "NOOOOOO!" But it was too late. My desperate cry from the back seat had changed our course! We were headed for Memphis!


(until the next exit when my dad had my brother turn around and head back towards the grandparents)