The Night Cary Grant Hooted

Photo courtesy of Dr. Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans

It started with Cary Grant screaming.

Well, maybe you’d call it more of a hoot. “Squeal” is too high, “scream” too sharp. It’s this startled “whoooo!” sound that’s rather difficult to describe.

It was 2006. The Olympics were in Torino and I was in Alaska. It was February, one of our warmer weeks of that month, and the sky was overcast.

Your television options were pretty limited back in 2006 in Glennallen. There was satellite or analog antenna—which basically meant satellite or nothing. My antenna picked up a fuzzy NBC that cut out regularly.  Sometimes. The rest of the time it picked up nothing. Thank goodness for VCRs, DVD players, the local library, Netflix, and the personal collections of friends. Golden resources for your entertainment needs.

I’d borrowed Bringing up Baby from the library. Videos were typically a better bet from there—the DVDs were regularly scratched. So I was watching it on video when my friend Kristie called to chat. I pressed pause. And we got talking.

Remember how on VCRs, if you put the video on pause, it would hold for about 10 or 15 minutes and then it would start playing again?

I was standing in the kitchen, back to the living room and the TV, deep in the midst of our conversation. And then Cary Grant hooted. Scared me out of my bones. I squealed.

Kristie laughed at me as I recovered myself and explained what had happened. I scrambled to find the remote, this time planning to press STOP. I tracked it down on the couch and pushed the button with the little white square.

And I had TV.

I’m pretty sure those precise words came out of my mouth, actually.

“Kristie! I have TV!”
Her response was just as excited. “You do!?”
And in the instant it took her to say that much, I’d realized what was on my screen. “It’s men’s figure skating! It’s the Olympics!”
Kristie responded with the only logical question: “Can I come over?”

She did, and we reveled in the wonder of television. (Note bene, when you don’t watch TV for a long time, commercials become interesting.) We watched as sport after sport was shown. Bob Costas expertly guided us through the evening’s events.

And then he introduced us to Snowboard Cross.

The sport was making its Olympic debut that year. I’d never seen anything like it. The ski and snowboarding events had always been my least favorite parts of the Olympics, mostly because they were races against the clock, not another competitor. If you’re going to race, I’ve always thought, you should see your competition out of the corner of your eye. But here it was: a snowboarding event with four racers at a time.

We watched until they turned off the Olympic coverage that night, and I didn’t get TV again for the rest of its run.

It was one magical night when the stars aligned (somewhere, high above the low-lying clouds*): a good friend by my side, an entertainment treat, and a new sport to look forward to watching every four years. Just think, if it hadn’t been for that night, I might not have discovered Snowboard Cross until 2010.

And I owe it all to Cary Grant’s hooting.

 

*I’m fairly certain that these low-lying clouds were the reason for our serendipitous signal that night. On clear nights, I never saw anything on TV.