A Brief Introduction
This is one of my old journal entries which has been revived in order to provide context and backstory to my Naked In Cyberspace (Annotated) post on Uncensored BBS. It doesn't really have anything to do with the essays about Furry fandom currently hosted in this directory and is only included here for historical purposes.
Perhaps I'll write a further annotated version of Naked In Cyberspace (Annotated) in the future. Everything changes.
June 10, 1999
But you know the old saying: You can't win, you can't lose, you can't even quit the game. Sometimes, it doesn't matter whether you have pizza delivered or you go pick it up. Sometimes, things happen because you want to see Dances With Wolves.
This is the part of our story where I tell you about the Dances With Wolves Curse.
It sounded simple enough: Dances With Wolves was playing in the theatres. We wanted to go see it. Nothing unusual about that.
The first time we tried to go see it, we missed the beginning of the movie at Hawthorne Multiplex by 10 minutes. For some odd reason, we decided to try to catch it 45 minutes later in Bronxville, which despite our mad rush to get there, we also missed by 10 minutes. Nobody wanted to do a midnight showing, so we ended up going out for coffee and donuts in Bronxville, and decided to see Dances With Wolves some other night.
The next time we tried to see the movie was when we didn't realize we were trying to see it. Rather, we had promised Mom we'd go see it with her, and had made other plans the night we were supposed to see it. So Mom ended up getting pissed off and no, we didn't see the movie that night either.
Third time's a charm, right?
I'm going to digress here a moment and tell you all about my 1980 Plymouth Arrow, the car I was driving back then. This was the car that Dad originally owned, then my older brother Xakor, then my younger brother Renfield, and eventually me. This was the car that Dad took us on trips to Lake George and Cape May in. This was the car that Xakor and I cruised around in, listening to Rush and Pink Floyd and eating jellybeans. This was the car that Renfield backed into a telephone pole so that the hatchback never closed properly afterward.
It was the first car I actually owned, and it was a damn nice car, too.
Nice car, know what I mean?
So the third time we tried to see Dances With Wolves, everything was going along just fine. I picked up Bill from Hastings, we drove up to Hawthorne (I had moved from Dobbs Ferry in 1990), and had planned on eating pizza for dinner and then heading off for the movie afterward. I pulled into the driveway at Hawthorne and parked my car right up close to the garage door, because other people were going with us and we needed space for everyone to park.
"Do you smell something burning?" asked Bill, after we got out of the car.
"Oh," I shrugged, "it's just my car. It always smells like that."
And we didn't think anything else of it. We were finally going to see Dances With Wolves, after all, and needed to decide whether or not to go out for pizza or have it delivered. Ted (my boyfriend at the time) and Mom showed up shortly after we arrived, and we made the call to get pizza delivered so we could eat and go.
Ten minutes later, we hear someone honking outside. Gee, awfully fast service for a pizza place.
So I ran upstairs to go pay the pizza man, and Mom was standing in the doorway waving at the guy in the car to bring us our pizza, and trying to understand why the pizza man was shouting at us. Then we realized he wasn't the pizza man.
"Your car's on fire!" the guy yelled, pointing to driveway.
And I looked down in the driveway and saw the engine compartment of my car was, in fact, on fire---and it was parked right up against the garage door of the house.
To make a long story short: We called the fire department, everyone got out of the house, I called the fire department again wondering what was taking them so long, the fire department showed up, my car had to be junked because there was nothing left of the engine but a scorched lump of metal when it was all over, and we did not get to see Dances With Wolves that evening.
It could've been worse. If my car caught fire an hour later, the only one home would've been my grandmother.
Bill told me afterwards that someday we'd look back at it all and laugh. These days, it's an ongoing joke that we shouldn't try to see Dances With Wolves because something even worse will undoubtedly happen, like a plane will crash into our house or Dan Quayle will get elected president.
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