Hit Him Back, Sidney

By some miracle, I actually have some free time. I was walking through Target, past the book section, and saw Sidney Poitier's face staring at me from the cover of his book The Measure of A Man. I thought 'I love Sidney, he's amazing' and decided it would be a worthwhile book to read, as it is his 'spiritual autobiography' as he says, a book about life. So far, I love the book. I always laugh inside when he says 'you know?' at the end of a sentence. Anyways, there is this one part that made me laugh out loud that you should read. This was the first movie of his that his family saw - which also happened to be the first movie that his mother and father had seen ever (the movie was No Way Out in 1950.
"My mother was sitting there, a woman who really didn't know anything about movies. My father was sitting there, a guy who really didn't know anything about movies. The movie played, and they were absolutely enthralled with what they saw, letting go with "That's my kid!" and all that. But near the end of the movie Richard Widmark pistol-whips me with this pistol, the butt of this pistol. He's beating the crap out of me with this pistol, and my mother jumps up in the theater and yells, "Hit him back, Sidney! Hit him back! You never did nothing to him!" In front of everybody. My brothers and sisters are squirming and laughing, saying, "Mama, sit down, sit down." But she's not joking. She's for real, completely in the moment. "Hit him back, Sidney! Hit him back!"
That was my mother."

Don't you love it? Please tell me you laughed...
But isn't it funny to think about what it was like to live back then, seeing your first movie - which isn't like the first movie we saw. We have grown up with TV. Movies aren't anything new to us, we know television, computers, missions to the moon and outer space, cable, cell phones ... Sidney (yes, he and I are on a first name basis now) even grew up without indoor plumbing or electricity. Yet if you do read his book, he describes this life, and to me, it really does sound like a simple paradise (of course the fact that he lived in the Bahamas might have something to do with it.)
Well those are my thoughts for now.