I was in the grocery store the other day when my phone rang. It was my son, Sam.
“Can you pick up some corn syrup and cream of tartar please?” he asked.
“Corn syrup and cream of what?” I asked.
“I want to make sugar glass,” he explained.
Ah. It made perfect sense.
Sam’s become very theatrical lately.
If he’s not dressing up and acting in skits that he’s made up with his seven year old sister Daisy, he’s preparing special mixtures like chocolate blood and sugar glass that he can use in his videos.
I’d never heard of sugar glass before, but I watched the YouTube video where he discovered it and learned how to make the transparent breakaway substance, along with a bunch of other interesting concoctions.
Sam was fascinated to have these Hollywood secrets revealed. It reminded me of being a little girl and finding out that the ice cream they were eating in the Happy Days show was actually scoops of cold mashed potatoes.
At the age of 10, Sam has decided that he wants to be an actor and make his own movies.
He’s taken our video camera and filmed footage that has him and his sister in stitches.
I’d like to teach him how to edit his work in iMovie, but I have no idea how. I guess it’s time to learn.
What an incredible difference between what is available as entertainment to them now as compared to when I was their age.
There were no iPhones, digital video cameras, computers or even videos when I was a child. If there had been, I would have been in heaven.
If we wanted to watch a show there was no such thing as going to the video store and renting it or ordering it off the TV or internet.
We had to wait until it aired on regular TV or played in the movie theatres.
And if your parents couldn’t afford to put you in dance class, you didn’t learn how to dance.
How times have changed. I was watching my kids play Kinect Dance Central the other day, a game they just got from their grandparents at Christmas.
Standing in front of the TV with no remotes, they followed the dancers in the game and mimicked all the steps they saw and whoever flubbed up the least won.
Not only did the game teach them some cool dance moves, they had a blast doing it.
Oh, to be a kid again. If someone had told me half of what would become available I wouldn’t have believed them.
And the technological advances I’ve witnessed in the last few decades pale in comparison to what my grandmother’s seen since she was a girl.
It’ll be interesting to see what’s in store for the generations to come.
The thought of it’s so exhausting I feel like curling up on the couch and watching an old episode of Happy Days with a big bucket of popcorn.
Hopefully with white cheddar seasoning rather than the cream of tartar I recently sprinkled on it by mistake.
Lori Welbourne is a Black Press columnist, www.onabrighternote.ca.
