When we were twelve years old, my friend Sumner and I watched Cobra Woman, at the Circle Theater in Brookline, Massachusetts. The film starred Maria Montez in a dual role as the evil high priestess of a volcanic island and her good twin sister. At our age, we didn't realize that the acting was bad and the script idiotic, not could we know that Montez's phallic dance before a cobra altar would become a camp classic. We did not see that the film was, in the words of Scott Ashlin, an "amazing spectacle of bad taste." Instead, we took the ridiculous adventure story at face value and watched it enthralled. Alas, Sumner died a few years ago, but my encounter with Cobra Woman lives on.
When I was twelve, my brother was eight and our sister six. Shortly after I had seen the film, I told them that I was not who they thought I was. No, I simply looked like their brother. Their real brother was a prisoner on Cobra Island, which I proceeded to describe in lurid detail, and I told them that if they did not do whatever I wanted them to do, their brother would be killed. My acting might not have been even as good as that of Maria Montez, but it was good enough to convince my brother and sister, who begged me not to harm their brother. I then proceeded to faint, and when I came to, I was their brother again. I told them what I had seen on Cobra Island, where the inhabitants worshiped a cobra and threw condemned prisoners into a live volcano.
My play-acting continued for several months, during which I enjoyed scaring my siblings. Either they eventually wised up or I grew bored with the charade, but in any case my evil impersonator finally retired to Cobra Island, where he has remained to this day. I might have forgotten those afternoons in which I frightened my brother and sister with the story, had it not made such an impression on them. As a result they tease me about it from time to time. I'm glad they've kept its memory alive. Unlike other youthful behaviors, which sometimes make me cringe with embarrassment when I recall them, this one makes me smile.
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I wish I had been clever enough to do this sort of thing to my siblings! I merely threatened them with the Toilet Monster (thus making toilet-training exponentially more difficult for my mother), or convincing them that I could change channels by wiggling my fingers. The remote was, naturally, hidden behind my back.
ReplyDeleteAravis, your television trick is impressive. I don't think it would have occurred to me had television been commercially available when I was frightening my siblings. It arrived a few years later.
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