Signs I'm getting old

I saw that today is the 65th birthday of George Lucas. I have vague memories of when Star Trek came out, as I was just shy of my fifth birthday at the time. What I have more distinct memories of, however, is Meco's disco arrangement. In fact, it wasn't until I saw the movie that I learned the Meco version was not, in fact, the actual theme of the movie. Another 1977 movie song I remember (I sure don't remember the movie, since it wasn't very successful at the time) was You Light Up My Life. I remembered the lead actress, Didi Conn, from the sitcom Benson, and remember being quite surprised when I learned that Didi Conn had appeared in "the movie with that Debby Boone song". Not only that, but Boone doesn't sing the arrangement in the movie. Even more surprisingly, You Light Up My Life has made it to DVD.

Other movie-related things I have vague memories of from my distant childhood include the 1970s remake of King Kong, which came out about the time I would have seen my first movie. I distinctly recall seeing the Fay Wray original as part of a Saturday morning program the local library did for kids. I'm not certain if that was my very first movie, though. My uncle was a projectionist who later managed the local "Cinema 1-2-3" (back in the days when it was a big deal to have three movie screens under one roof! Ha!), and had a bunch of old movies that he would show on a sheet put up in Grandma's back yard in the summer. The only one of those movies I remember seeing was the Doris Day western Calamity Jane. For a kid of about four or five, it's dreadfully dull, and perhaps it's clouded my judgment of musicals and westerns to this day. I'm not certain of the first movie I actually saw in a theater, but it might have been Disney's The Rescuers.

A year or two later, I remember seeing the local newspaper listings of movie times showing An Unmarried Woman for weeks on end. With a title like that, and its R rating, it sounded so exotic and grown-up for a six-year-old. Obviously, at the time, I had no concept of the "chick flick".

Fast forward a few years to when I was old enough to start buying singles. Even the idea of buying individual songs on 45-rpm vinyl records is old-fashioned now, of course. Of the records I bought, one of the first was Sheena Easton's For Your Eyes Only, which of course is the title song from the James Bond movie. And as another sign of how old I'm getting, consider that late last month, Sheena Easton turned 50. Yikes.