MATW: Thinking about dreams...

You know, it's been five days since I had some serious oral surgery. I've needed it for years, and my mouth looks a WHOLE lot better. But being off work has given me time to do a few things...

Including think about dreams...

I grew up in a tiny town in eastern Washington state, with 500 people in the whole town. It had a tavern, a cafe, a small library/water department office, a drug store, a grocery store, a bank, a couple of beauty parlors, a grange, and a couple of gas stations, plus a few little shops here and there. It was a wheat community...the entire town was surrounded on all sides by fields of grain.
God how I HATED that place. I even hated some of the people.

I was overweight. I couldn't play sports. When all the other kids (all 200 of them, grades K-12...yes I said Kindergarten through Seniors...my graduating class was the largest from my school in over 50 years...we had 21 kids in the class) were listening to Kiss and other heavy metal, I was grooving to my favorite music: Donna Summer, Anita Ward, and (shudder) Barry Manilow. I was definately a "Square Peg".

After graduation, I got out of there, and went back to Ohio for 12 years. I had spent my grade school years there, and because, according to my aunt, my grandmother was on her deathbed, we moved back (she finally did die, 13 YEARS later...).

in 1993, after meeting a young woman because she joined a fan club I ran for an old british sci-fi series, and I had gotten to know her and fell in love with her, I moved to Boston. Boston was my town of DREAMS when I was a kid, in both Ohio and Washington...after all, Boston was THE big city...ZOOM was produced in Boston. Oh, how I wanted to be on that show when I was a kid...

Anyway, I'm getting into stuff that isn't relevant to what I was saying...

Back in the little tiny hell in Washington, I wasn't what you would call a popular kid. I had a few close friends, all of them younger than me. Only one or two kids from my class were what I considered "close friends". I do miss them (and i've just tracked one of them i've been out of touch for far too long down...thank you, Classmates.Com....) but although their friendships were nice, I knew instinctively that the dreams I had were never going to come true. They were, in order:

1) Meet, Date, and Marry Kristy McNichol (damn, is that dating myself or WHAT?)
2) Become a world famous actor and recording star
3) Become Rich and Famous and never get a big head.
4) Meet Tony Alva or Stacy Peralta and learn to skateboard with one of them as my teacher.

I was right. Those dreams never did come true. My life never gave me the opportunties to get into the acting or music business, and growing up where I did, I had NO idea how to make them happen.

All those dreams have come flooding back the past few months, ever since the release of "Lords of Dogtown". It was a movie about dreams and aspirations, the story of the very skateboarders I grew up wanting so much to be like.

There's another character in the movie, a kid named Sid. One of the Dogtown boys. Sid was a rich kid who hung out with the poor kids because he wanted to be as talented as they were on the skateboard. I know how Sid felt. There were several younger friends of mine who were awesome on the skateboard. Me, I never could get the hang of it. I relate to Sid. He was the same way.

He also never existed. At least not in the way he's portrayed in the movie (brilliantly played, I might add, by a young actor to watch named Michael Angarano , who is also the star of Disney's "Sky High").

Sid is, according to the Dogtown companion book, an amalgym of several different people. Mostly, he's really Gino, a rich friend who couldn't skateboard or surf, but still longed to be part of the cool skateboarding world.

For those of you who haven't seen the movie and still plan to, perhaps you'd better skip the rest of this because I'm about to give away the ending of the movie...you have been warned.

***

By the movies end, the three principles have all gone their separate ways. Tony, Stacy, and Jay Adams had drifted apart in the process of becoming the fathers of modern skateboarding. Sid, ever loyal to his friends, managed to find a way to bring them back together. Well, he didn't find it, really; it found him.

He discovered that an inner ear problem he'd always had throughout his teen years had actually been a malignant tumor in his brain.

The end of the movie brings Jay, Tony, and Stacy together to see their now-terminally ill friend, and to try and bring him some happiness and comfort for what would be his final few weeks on earth.

Sid/Gino died of brain cancer just a few short weeks after the Big 3 Z-Boys came back together, at age 18. In doing so, he helped make a legend out of reality.

For it was the gigantic empty pool in Sid/Gino's backyard that became a part of history. Sid/Gino's dad had told his son that he and his friends could trash the pool, and could skate all they wanted. Anything to help make his son's final days on earth happy days. And when the original Z-Boys - all of them - gathered there day after day to skate the pool and hang out with Sid/Gino, they were creating THE LEGEND.

Skateboarders and skateboard fans like me worldwide, from yesterday and today, know all about the Z-Boys, and how they ushered in a sport that today is considered worthy of network TV time and earns people like Bucky Lasek, Tony Hawk, Sandro Dias, Pierre Luc Gagnon, Paul "P-Rod" Rodriguez (son of the comedian), Ryan Sheckler, and Shaun White a fortune.

Even though Sid/Gino didn't live very long, his dream of bringing his friends together again lived on. And still does. Because it was Sid/Gino's empty pool that became known worldwide...as the infamous "DogBowl".

***
Why do I feel I should now say...(PAUL HARVEY VOICE) now you know.....the REST of the story...

No matter.

Kim (my other half), being several years my junior, had no idea why I was interested in a movie like Lords of Dogtown when it came out. And I really couldn't explain it either. But I knew I had to see it when it opened. I'm glad I did. Columbia marketed the movie so badly it never had any chance at the box office, despite critical acclaim from a lot of major film critics. It disappeared from theatres just a couple weeks after it's release.

This week, it hit DVD. I ordered it weeks ago and couldn't wait until it arrived. But I waited a few days to sit down and watch it. I left the theatre almost in tears at the end of the movie, both from the story, and because I felt I was watching something special. And I knew it would happen again, and it did.

There will probably not be any major awards for Dogtown, though it deserves it. Emile Hirsch, John Robinson, Victor Rasuk, the aforementioned Michael Angarano, Rebecca DeMornay, and Heath Ledger all deliver Oscar-caliber performances.

But, like my dreams were to me long ago, it's destined to be overlooked and forgotten at awards time.

Dogtown also helped one other thing. It made me remember that a dream is what YOU make of it. It CAN be everything you want it to be, or could fade into oblivion.

My newer dreams are still alive and kicking, though none of my original four will ever happen. I keep threatening to buy a skateboard, and Kim keeps reminding me that my bad knees, bad back, and bad everything else, not to mention my bad BALANCE will just shatter the dream again.

But my other dream - making my websites a success as a business so that I can quit my everyday job and work for myself doing websites about what I love - wrestling , food, and music - well, it's still working, if not coming true just yet. I'm very proud of The Complete Cooking Show Compendium, even though after 7 months of hard work, the press release when the site opened generated ZERO coverage. I'm also proud of The Moonsault Chef, RadioTC, SlamJamz Central, and every other project I work on. I hope one day that my dreams will become more than just a dream, but reality.

My childhood heroes seem pretty happy with life, if the behind the scenes extras on the Dogtown DVD are any indication. Tony's run his own skateboard company for over 20 years, Jay, despite his time in prison on drug charges, keeps surfing and skateboarding, and Stacy...well, he WROTE the movie, and the award-winning documentary it's based on, Dogtown And Z-Boys (also well worth a look).

What's the point of all of this maudlin stuff? Well, I guess to say that even when i'm having days when I think all my work will come to naught, I can still put my arm around the worman I love, and know that I can keep trying, even if i'm not really happy with my life and that fact that I feel like I haven't accomplished anything in the 42 years i've been here.

But that's the breaks, I guess. I've lived with it for all that time. I can keep living with it until I finally DO make my dreams come true.

As usual, it's Me Against The World....

TC