Save Me the Aisle Seat: A Brief Excerpt
Movies have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest childhood memories center on little snippets of black-and-white movies I glimpsed while my parents watched television in the Florida room of our second Miami home; they are vague because I was less than two years old and my dad was still alive, but sometimes I still see, in my mind’s eye, little fragments of old John Wayne Westerns and war movies which my father had enjoyed. It’s no exaggeration when I say that my childhood relationship with the movies was one of the key influences during my formative years. Because I had very few father figures beyond my maternal grandfather and several uncles before I entered junior high, I tended to mimic certain traits of actors and movie characters I admired. I wanted to be as brave as John Wayne’s many cowboys and military heroes, as idealistic as Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker, as dashing-and-daring as Errol Flynn and Clark Gable, and as funny as Stev