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Three Films That Were Woven Through My Collegiate Experience
The films were woven through my collegiate experience. Coincidentally, each of them featured, or starred, John Travolta.
Carrie was released nineteen days before I left the campus for my first Christmas holiday break.
Saturday Night Fever was release during my second Christmas holiday break, but I did not see it until the spring break of 1978.
I saw Urban Cowboy on my birthday, Tuesday, June 17th, 1980, ten days after I graduated with my BA in History. The price of two admissions, plus a very expensive dinner afterward, was my parents' birthday gift to me (to include the person I was, then, dating). Naive as I was, I could not have realized that beginning on Thursday, October 2nd, of 1980 through the last day of February, 1982, I would experience a period of time full of the most abject failures, incredibly stupid decisions, and a sense of disappointment so overwhelming that, looking back at it from the perspective of now (and I still have nightmares about it from time to time), I can only ascribe my survival (that is my avoidance of suicide) to the Grace of Almighty God.
To this day, when I view any of these three films, as I am doing right now while writing these words, I feel compelled to relive, at least momentarily, those unpleasant memories---especially the period that began on October 2nd, 1980. The sound tracks from these film also carry, for me, a double significance: what they represented in or through the movies in which they were heard, and these same periods of time in my personal history.
At no time during that entire period of 1976 through 1982, did I bother at all to consider what my life would be like in the future---that is, now, this day, this moment, at the age of sixty-five and a half, and medically afflicted in ways I had never imagined possible. Yet the personal insights God has given me---not insights into great issues, but insights into my own stupid behaviors, or into the pattern of preparation for this particular stage (I believe it to be the last) of my life in this world.
Starward
