The Two Takes

This week one of us is on their game, the other is not, so we bring you this special edition.  His Take:  This is not the article that you were supposed to be reading. That one will follow soon, and it’s about the 30th anniversary of Tim Burton’s groundbreaking 1989 Batman movie, how it affected our culture and still does to this day, the impact it made on the summer “event” movie, and my personal experience with the film and that magical summer of 1989. Yeah, that was the article you were supposed to get, BUT yesterday something happened. A BIG something. You know that overused phrase “broke the internet”? This time it broke. Let me take that back, it actually shattered. Like a glass bottle on the pavement, shattered into thousands of pieces.  I’m talking, of course, about yesterday's announcement on Sports Illustrated that Vince McMahon has appointed Paul Heyman and Eric Bischoff to run WWE’s two flagship shows, Raw and Smackdown Live!. More importantly, this wa...

It's a testament to our friendship that when one of us suggested we write about John Candy this week, the other didn't question it. Read on, you'll see why.  His Take: For the first time, I’m not using the internet to at all to help me write this article because I want everything to come from my heart on this one. I’m not even going to fact check or use the internet for grammar or better words, so excuse the spelling and all that stuff. I don’t remember what the first John Candy movie that I saw was. It was maybe Splash. I just remember that when he was onscreen he commanded your attention. Not because of his size, but because he had a larger than life presence. Again, not because of his size. You immediately focused on him because he was the center of attention and you knew that, given a minute or two, he was going to say something awesome. Think 1960;’s era Star Trek William Shatner, but funny, One of, if not THE best thing I found about John Candy is that he was g...

Her Take: This is a special message for my co-blogger, and you, if you need it. Know that right now, exactly right now, and from this moment on, you’re doing just fine, no matter what you do. Sometimes fine looks like bursting into the day, tackling everything that comes your way, and crushing it at every turn. Other days fine is having the strength to brush your teeth and get dressed even though everything in your head tells you that you can’t. It’s those things, everything in between, and sometimes it’s not being able to face anything, deciding to wait until you have the strength, and feeling lost for a little while. You’ve felt lost, discouraged, and hopeless in your life, you’ve felt so many different and painful things, but here you are, still standing, surviving, and that makes you a winner even when you can’t see it. You’re too hard on yourself, you put yourself down and forget sometimes that you’re a magical being made of pure light who was sent here to live, l...

His Take: Summer! It turns me upside down. Summer, summer, summer. It’s like a merry go round. Yes, those are the opening lines to the classic Cars song “Magic”, but it’s also exactly how I feel about summer. As a little guy, summer was a magical land filled with comic books, candy, Mickey Mouse ice cream bars, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, lakes, girls, a lot of kissing….okay, I’m gonna pull the reins back here and for the purpose of this article, I’m gonna focus on the summers of my early years. So like, late 70’s/early 80’s. And if I don’t get dates exactly right, you’ll have to excuse me. I was a kid and as a kid, you don’t really pay attention to dates. Unless you’re a baseball fan. How do those guys keep all that shit straight? Somedays I call my cat by my dogs name. And my dog died 20 years ago.  SO, let’s go back to the late 70’s/early 80’s. It was a golden age. A time when people didn’t lock their doors. You could tell your mom “I’m going into town with Sam...