True Story

So, when I was younger, we used to visit this beach every summer. I mean, every summer, we'd go to the beach for three days, spend two days at grandma Mississippi’s house. The beach was called "Crystal Beach" and it was a pretty good beach, I must admit, especially for me being six years old, then seven, then eight then nine then ten, etc. We stopped going there when I was ten actually, so take out that "etc." I don't remember the earliest I went there... maybe three years old? You wouldn't really know, so forget I asked the question.

Well, this beach was pretty sweet, as I said, and our entire family would just play on it, and there was this restaurant called Ruby Tuesday's we always ate it. It was gross. Speaking of restaurant, some famous thrill horror writer who died recently always called them "diners" because he couldn't spell restaurant. That's really sad, unless he was referring to Ruby Tuesday's, because he would have been better off calling them "poo-houses" as that name is more apt.

Well, there were also casinos near the beach, some ON THE WATER which I thought was cool (as a seven, eight and nine year old only) to gamble on the Gulf of Mexico. I'd gamble on stupid stuff like how many seagulls would pass by and not poo on us. If we were at Ruby Tuesdays, I would have bet on zero, as that is their primary source of entrees. Ruby Tuesday's is in fact an anagram for seagull poo. Figure that one out.

So, Crystal beach was an alright place, but like I said, we'd always visit grandma afterwards. Now my grandma is blindingly Baptist, and or family being Mormon as it was, we often had awkward situations, i.e. going to my grandma's church and wondering where the sunbeams met. Only Mormons will get that reference. What if we opened up a Mormon restaurant with Mormon themed dishes? That might be pretty cool, but the demographic is of course limited.

But, Grandma's house was sweet because she had Chinese checkers and real checkers. I never learned how to play Chinese checkers, but I’d have fun beating my brother, as he also did not know how to play. Then there were about five thousand naked ken and Barbie dolls from my older sister and younger cousins- that was weird for my brother and me. I'll stick to Mousetrap.

That was a sweet game. You'd set it all up and then you'd pretend to try and start really playing it, but then you'd set the thing off just to watch it go. Then you'd lose a piece and never use it again. If you could have sold replacement parts to mousetrap, you'd have been rich. Another sweet game? Snakes and Ladders, which is currently being adapted into a film with Samuel L. Jackson- "Snakes on a Ladder." Featuring SLJ as Jackson Gruff, a CIA agent assigned to help an old man under the witness protection program. Everything goes smoothly till a light bulb burns out. The old man goes to fix it with his eighteen footer, and by the fifth step it becomes obvious some terrorist has unleashed a multitude of serpents upon this helpless old man and his ladder. Will the old man make it? Will this movie become an internet cult hit? We many never know.

If you read all this, you get five stars.