Let's Go to a S H O W

I've told you that my parents loved books. They also loved movies. When my father was in high school, his parents used to let him take the car and drive the 77 miles from Modesto to San Francisco just to see movies. All of his life, he was a big movie fan and if he had done the movie meme he probably wouldn't have been able to list a single movie that he had been wanting to see for a long time, because he saw most of them. My mother loved them too, although perhaps not as much as he did. Mama and I are alike -- we can get our movie fix when they are on TV, but Forrest takes after our father -- there is hardly a movie that he wants to see that he doesn't see when it first comes out.

When I was little, we went to the movies every Friday night. When I was about three, my father started coming home and instead of talking about it, would spell "Let's go to a s...h...o...w". In those days, they spelled all sorts of things they didn't want me to know about. It took me, my mother says, exactly once to figure that one out. The second week he spelled it, I called out, "Yes. Let's go to the show!"