The Wrong Turn

Many years ago--sometime during the early-to-mid 1990s--I was out with my friends Jeff, Susan, Tony, Steven and Ron. Carrie and Allan may have been there too. We were out searching for films to play for our semi-regular bad movie night. Back in those halcyon days, we would visit video rental stores and pore over racks and racks of VHS cassettes. Sometimes the trip itself was as fun or more than the movies themselves.

In this particular instance, we spotted a video store in the Oliver district of Edmonton, in the strip mall that hosts a Brit's Fish & Chips now. We sauntered in and started browsing, and within a few minutes we all realized that the entire store consisted only of the porn section...it was, in fact, an adult video store, a fact that all of us somehow missed. We skittered out, tittering nervously, faces flushed with embarrassed laughter. We were all close, but not so close that we had any interest in perusing pornography together; we were not nearly so hip.

I don't recall if we regrouped to find another video store or if we wound up playing board games or something. It's funny how some memories stick, while others flutter off into invisibility. 

Grandma's Satellite Dish

Mom or Dad shot this sometime in the late 1980s on a trip to visit Grandma in Cranberry Portage, Manitoba. I wasn't on that trip, but I'm sure I would have been impressed by Grandma and Val's new satellite television antenna, which loomed large in their back yard for several years. Cranberry Portage is just a few minutes' drive from Flin Flon, so it's not as isolated as some northern communities, but the presence of this dish is a sign of the technology needed to tie tiny frontier settlements to the outside world. I remember being very impressed with their collection of movies on VHS, too. Up north, entertainment options were limited to fishing and whatever movies you could import from down south.