THE NORMAL SCHOOL | POP CULTURE | 5 He Father Is the Hero

Normal school thea literary magazine :: special issue, may 2020 :: pop culture MARGIE SARSFIELD Rewatch Value: An Autobiography ��05 EMMA BOLDEN To Mend His Troubled Mind ��16 ANDREW KANE Poison Oak, Halloween ��18 ALLISON PINKERTON Evie Heals ��19 in this issue KATE O’DONOGHUE Batgirl Elegy��29 JULIE MARIE WADE Miami is My Tipperary ��30 JULIETA VITULLO Broken Waters ��49 TEX GRESHAM It’s a Small World ��64 JACOB LINDBERG Ode to Arm Bars��71 JOSHUA ELWAND SMITH Thank You, Kermit ��73 BRIAN SIMONEAU I’ve been Coming to Where I Am from the Get Go ��86 CAROLINE DE LACVIVIER Disaster Preparedness ��87 Normal school thea literary magazine :: special issue, may 2020 :: pop culture founding editors Sophie Beck, Steven Church, and Matt Roberts managing editor Mellissa Jessen-Hiser senior associate editors Kirk Alvaro Lua (Poetry), Addison Ellis (Fiction), Will Freeney (Nonfiction) associate editors masthead Elizabeth Bolaños, Addison Ellis, Aaliyah Green, Nou Her, Mellissa Jessen-Hiser, Yia Lee, Kirk Alvaro Lua assistant editors Brock Allen, Rodolfo Avelar, Erika Ceballos, Will Christensen, Mary Coomes, Karissa Ellison, Will Freeney, Sydney Hinton, Xai Lee, Carolina Mata, Angela Mendoza, Melinda Medeiros, Shelby Pinkham, Michael Ramirez, Ernesto Reyes, Jer Xiong editorial interns Rodolfo Avelar, Nou Her, Sydney Hinton genre editors Brynn Saito (Poetry), Venita Blackburn (Fiction), Steven Church (Nonfiction) art director Rodolfo Avelar production manager Jefferson Beavers social media coordinator Elizabeth Bolaños o N rmal school Normal school thea literary magazine :: special issue, may 2020 :: pop culture thea literary magazine :: special issue, may 2020 :: pop culture normal support Colossal thanks to California State University, Fresno, especially: Dr� Joseph I� Castro, President Dr� Xuanning Fu, Interim Vice Provost Dr� Honora Chapman, Interim Dean, College of Arts and Humanities Dr� Sergio La Porta, Interim Associate Dean, College of Arts and Humanities Dr� Lisa Weston, Interim Chair, Department of English masthead Lisa Galvez, Administrative Analyst, College of Arts and Humanities Jefferson Beavers, Communication Specialist, Department of English The College of Arts and Humanities The Department of English Instructionally Related Activities Fund TRUST US. WE’RE NORMAL. Rewatch Value: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY MARGIE SARSFIELD Photo by Stef Ming on Foter.com / CC BY THE SHINING A family heads to an isolated hotel for the winter where a sinister presence influences the father into violence, while his psychic son sees horrific fore- bodings from both past and future. y mother loves this movie� So do I� In Mit, Jack Nicholson plays my father, if my father’s name was Jack� Danny Lloyd plays Danny and Jack Nicholson plays Jack and Shelley Duvall plays Wendy� Shelley Duvall tells the doctor that something good came out of Jack breaking Danny’s arm: he’s sober now� Stephen King hated this adaptation of his nov- el; in the book, Jack gets redeemed at the end� THE NORMAL SCHOOL | POP CULTURE | 5 he father is the hero� In the movie, Jack Nicholson is a shithead from start to finish� THe’s a wannabe writer, like my father� Scatman Cruthers tells little Danny that the hotel is full of pictures that can’t hurt him� Danny sees dead twins in a hallway and there’s no booze at the hotel but Jack manages to get drunk anyway� Shelley Duvall takes care of almost everything while Jack Nicholson plays wallball and writes the same sentence a thousand times, then he yells at her� Kubrick yelled at Shelley Duvall constantly on set, and told everyone else to be mean to her, too� He wanted her to act exactly the way she did� Jack has a nightmare about killing his wife and child� My father once had a nightmare about a burglar and he woke up choking my mother� Kubrick told Danny Lloyd that the movie was a drama and used a dummy in his place during a scene that would be too scary� Jack Nicholson gets tricked The father is the hero� In the movie, Jack Nicholson is a shithead from start to finish� He’s a wannabe writer, like my father� Scatman Cruthers tells little Danny that the hotel is full of pictures that can’t hurt him� Danny sees dead twins in a hallway and there’s no booze at the hotel but Jack manages to get drunk anyway� Shelley Duvall takes care of almost everything while Jack Nicholson plays wallball and writes the same sentence a thousand times, then he yells at her� Kubrick yelled at Shelley Duvall constantly on set, and told everyone else to be mean to her, too� He wanted her to act exactly the way she did� Jack has a nightmare about killing his wife and child� My father once had a nightmare about a burglar and he woke up choking my mother� Kubrick told Danny Lloyd that the movie was a drama and used a dummy in his place during a scene that would be too scary� Jack Nicholson gets tricked into making out with a gross old lady, and then she laughs at him! He needs a drink� In the bathroom, Grady the Ghost tells Jack Nicholson that he’s always been the caretaker at the hotel� Once, I lodged a protest regarding my father’s hitting habit and he countered by yelling about how much worse he had it growing up, and no one has ever talked about it since� Grady the Ghost chopped up his wife and daughters� Shelley Duvall talks to herself, pacing and smoking a cigarette in their bedroom, while their son screams redrum! redrum! That’s murder backwards� That’s not a spoiler� Stephen King didn’t like Shelley Duval� He said she wasn’t the blonde cheerleader-type he’d always imagined her character being� He compared her to “a screaming dish rag�” Jack Nicholson destroys the CB radio� Scatman Cruthers gets on a plane from Florida because he senses something wrong� Jack Nicholson types, types, types, Scatman Cruthers rents a car, Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd watch cartoons� She takes a bat with her when she goes down to confront Jack Nicholson� Some dude on a podcast I heard once complained that Shelley Duvall acts too helpless, frantic and weak, in this scene� Some dude on another podcast said: “does anyone not wanna see her get an axe in the head?” She waves the bat back and forth and snivels backwards up the stairs while Jack Nicholson mocks her, mimics her� For several years in a row my father gave my mother the exact same birthday card and each time she didn’t notice, he laughed at her for not remembering� Shelley Duvall loves her husband even after locking him in the pantry� Even when he gets out, even when he kills Scatman Cruthers, maybe even when he chops a hole in the door and says his famous line� It took three days and sixty doors 6 | THE NORMAL SCHOOL | POP CULTURE to film that scene� In the hedge maze, Danny runs through the snow with Jack limping like a minotaur behind him� To escape his father, Danny has to hide in his own footsteps� He has to go backwards� Danny Lloyd didn’t see the full version of The Shining until he was seventeen� Shelley Duvall swung the baseball bat forty-one times over the course of the film� Shelley Duvall ran up a staircase thirty-five times for one scene� Shelley Duvall said she “had to cry twelve hours a day, all day long, the last nine months straight, five or six days a week�” Shelley Duvall played a battered women and men didn’t like it� Once, playing a friendly charades-style game, my father pretended to hit and choke my mother but his hands actually did hit her cheek, actually did clasp around her neck� When I try to remember this memory, I try to remember my mother’s face when his hand hit her and I can’t� That’s the thing about memories: they’re not very reliable� Every time you remember something, you change it� My boyfriend asks me, if we were caretakers of the Overlook, who would be Jack Nich- olson� Obviously, we both agree, it’d be me� I don’t like when he interrupts my writing� That’s the thing about memories: they’re not very reliable. Every time you remember something, you change it. Urban Legend (1998) A college student suspects a series of bizarre deaths are connected to certain urban legends. reepy men always end up being helpful� If the first dead girl had listened to the gas Cstation attendant, she wouldn’t have been killed by the man in the backseat, but the gas station attendant was creepy� He had a stutter, like my ex, Drew, did� I hear he doesn’t anymore, though I didn’t hear it from him� We don’t speak much anymore – you’ll see why� They wanted to use a Land Rover for this scene but it’s impossible to swing an axe in a Land Rover� Alicia Witt’s friends are all dying� Her friend leaves her in the car when they hear a noise, then gets hung from a tree� She thinks her roommate is having sex when real- ly she’s

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