The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972)

Before last week I hadn’t seen this docudrama in more than twenty years. I know that Pa watched it at least once with Jim and me. It’s a Bigfoot movie rip-off that was produced by the community of Fouke, Arkansas (near the borders of Texas and Louisiana) in an attempt to get some national recognition for something. Twenty years ago it was clearly a bad movie, but I hadn’t realized how unbearably boring it was. It has a very entertaining 1972 grainy look and lots of wooden non-actors, but surprisingly that doesn’t help much.

As we watched it Nicole said, “This is a town full of Boomhauers.” And it was true. Beneath the bland narration, there flowed a steady stream of Texarkana gibberish from the people on screen, “Ding-dang-monster-got-me-gummit-freaked out-tell you what-dern-what you boys think ‘bout turkey hunting this year?”

The film begins with much too much footage of empty swampland and wildlife. Next we see a little boy running across fields and crawling over fences for far too long. He finally arrives at some kind of smokehouse or convenience store where he asks a geriatric man for help. The boy's mother has been frightened by a large, hairy, wild man on the property. The old coot laughs and says to tell her that he’ll stop by the following day and sends the boy away. The old man laughs with his even older friends and one of them spits into the wood burning stove.

This is followed by unending re-enactments about people who have noticed The Creature or its three-toed footprint in the woods while they were out hunting. One fellow who saw The Creature became so upset that he changed his gun ammunition from squirrel shot to buckshot. Eventually I fell asleep, but I woke up for the last story.

The narrator says that two couples, in order to share expenses, decided to move into the same house in the woods. For some reason this already sounds filthy. Before long The Creature stops by to visit them on a night when the men are gone and the women are alone. On this occasion much less happens than one might hope for. One of the women, while reading newspaper advertisements on the couch, hears The Creature as he hops onto the porch outside the window. Unfortunately the women just drive away in their car and nothing else happens that night.

The following evening, while the men are at the house, the woman in spectacles is talking about The Creature. Suddenly the blind flies off of the window and The Creature’s hairy arm reaches into the room. Now the men load the rifle. One of them suddenly has to go to the bathroom, so we watch from outside the window as he pulls down his trousers and sits down on the toilet. (I remember Dad's comment back in the day, "Is this necessary?") But these people are not even safe in the bathroom – The Creature pulls off the screen and attacks the bathroom window. The poor hillbilly has to run out of the toliet while he’s still pulling his trousers up over his long underwear.

There is some business regarding the men shooting into the woods from the porch and the women screaming from the window. At one point The Creature throws one of the guys through a large pane of glass and this story ends with him being taken to the hospital. I think that that window is probably where this story originated –

Doctor: “How did this man get thrown through a window?”

Jinger Hawkins: “Well there was this Creature…”

There’s a lot of dreadful pop music with lyrics about The Creature, the swamp, and the residents of Fouke, Arkansas. Yes, pop songs from 1972 about The Creature sound entertaining but they’re just…not. Jim used to parody these songs when we were kids but he lost his lyric sheet long ago, I last remember seeing it in our bedroom among the sheets of his unmade bed the day after he wrote them.

The best thing about the movie are the still images that one can snatch out of the long, plodding mess. I hope that someday I’ll be able to re-edit this movie myself for my own purposes.

Moffett's Chicken Pie Shoppe

Nicole and I have been exploring our neighborhood and ran across Moffett’s Chicken Pie Shoppe a few weeks ago. “Moffett” sounds like something out of Star Wars – Grand Moff Tarkin, Boba Fett, maybe some Ewok thrown in. What was the name of that robot dog thing in “Battlestar Galactica”?

We had dinner at this Chicken Pie Shoppe for the first time Friday night and almost went three nights in a row (they were closed on Sunday). Saturday night Mom and Dad came too and I remembered my camera.

Inside I was surprised to find that there was a chicken motif everywhere in the interior decorations. Even the curtains had chicken insignias on them. It was no accident. Nevertheless, Nicole had a ham steak on Saturday night, because she’s rebellious like that. Actually she had a chicken pie the first night.

You can have chicken pie with mixed dark and white meat or all white meat. I just don’t care, that’s why I had mixed meat both nights. That’s the way I do it.

They sell frozen raw pies out of a display case that you can take home and bake.

I meant to take a more appetizing picture of my dinner before I started to eat it, but then I forgot to take a picture until it was halfway gone. I was just so hungry. And I got so full – both nights I ended up feeling like I was going to have an out-of-body experience, like I was going to burst out of my body.

Speaking of the ghostly realm, there was the image of a woman that kept showing up in the pictures over my or my dad's shoulder. I experimented with adding a ghostly glow around her, and Nicole laughed at my experiments, but I was afraid that if she happened to research her favorite chicken pie shoppe on the internet it might hurt her feelings.

I think we'll be spending more time at this place. It’s one of the few places where you can be in America and Los Angeles at the same time. Another one is my apartment.

She finally resurfaces

She’s been MIA since about 1989. She was always capricious, but missing for eighteen years? Good heavens.

I discovered Min in the eighth grade,1982 - great saucer eyeglasses and a tendency to not draw attention to herself in class - and I said to myself “She’s about to become a remarkable woman and I know she’s going to be important to me! I’ve got to make her a part of my world!”

And so she was for many years - vital to my emotional health as we grew from saplings to confused trees. The confusion increased until in 1989 or so she slipped away into the outer chaos. I was too beset by undergraduate cares to track her movements and so we were sundered.

Fast forward to the present. Nicole and I are living in L.A. and purchased tickets to go to my 20-year (is it possible?) high school class reunion (thank you *again* Karen for all your organizing, you are a wonder worker on the level of Annie Sullivan). Unfortunately, due to our challenges this summer, we couldn’t make the scene. Later I did receive a booklet with contact information for former classmates, but I thought, “What’s the point? So much time has passed, people are busy and caught up in their lives.”

Then up pops an e-mail from our Min. I could not believe it. To make a long story short, she also lives in town and Nicole and I made plans to meet her for dinner. We went to a very popular Chinese dumpling restaurant about three blocks away from our new apartment. Afterwards we brought her home and stayed up late trying to catch up.

One of Min’s many characteristics that have not changed is her squeamishness about having her picture taken. I got her to pose once with Nicole and me but I still blew it and the picture came out blurry. The one food photo I took was of something Min ordered from the menu that was called simply “appetizer”. I think it was strips of tofu, maybe some ginger in there. When she ordered it I had a funny feeling that it was going to look unusual.

Anyway, I can’t properly convey the importance of this event, it’s like the restoration of a limb, or having Marvin Gaye raised from the dead.

Nicole is getting better, my job is getting better, I love our new apartment, and now the sea gives back one of the departed. Let’s have a great year!