Summer Childhood Movie Memories Blog-a-thon

Kate from Silents and Talkies, along with the Large Movie Blog Association is having a blog-a-thon about your summer childhood movie memories.

I don’t recall watching movies at all during my childhood summers. We kids were too busy with summer camps, swim camp, hiking, family reunions and other things that we wouldn‘t get to do after the weather turned icy cold.

There might have been one film that we watched one summer, but it could easily have been early autumn.

It was a Saturday, mom was working (always) and dad was keeping the kids at home. I loved it when he kept us without mom, sometimes, because he would usually give us more “naughty” foods than mom would allow.

This time he gave us chicken salad sandwiches, which, to this mostly vegetarian kid, was exotic. I was about 6 years of age.

We had a film on loan from the local library to watch as we ate our food. The movie was Hello Dolly! (1969), starring Barbra Streisand as “a Brooklynese Mae West gone wrong,” according to Forbidden Broadway. But that parody song was years away from being written.

I didn't know then that Carol Channing, Ginger Rogers, Mary Martin, Ethel Merman and Pearl Bailey - each with her own style of acting- had smashed it out of the park onstage. I didn't know then that Elizabeth Taylor's singing pipes had cost her the film role. I didn’t know then that there was a big to-do about Streisand's inappropriate age.I didn't know then that Walter Matthau had told his leading lady that she “had no more talent than a butterfly’s fart.”

I just thought Streisand was beautiful.