Six is just a number…I know…still…
I’m just a little wary of it. That’s funny, right?
It all started when my cousins took me to see The Omen, the original one with Gregory Peck and Lee Remick. They took me unbeknownst to my mom and dad, while they were “babysitting” me. I was 16. Ha!!! Still, because the laws were a little more stringent then about admittance into movies, I was technically underage at the time for that particular film and my cousins weren’t my parents. You can call it a sheltered. I’m calling it Thank God!
I’m basically NOT a horror movie fan. The age restrictions had allowed me to avoid seeing The Exorcist (still haven’t seen it and not sorry about it). My horror experiences had been limited to whatever came on one of the three available channels on our black and white television – generally on a Saturday, and ALWAYS because I couldn’t escape for one of two reasons —
- Either my cousin made me watch with her, because she was a huge fan of movies like The Tingler, The Blob, The Fly, The Pit and The Pendulum, What Ever Happened To Baby Jane, and Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte or…
- After my usual fare of Bugs Bunny, Wrestling, and Roller Derby ended, I couldn’t get to the knob fast enough to change the channel before The Twilight Zone guy commanded me to not touch the dial.
Yep, he said it and I was forced to comply. I remember audibly sighing and saying “Oh No” on occasion as I sat back down to wait for the next commercial break and an opportunity to exit the viewing area. I was an obedient child and his voice was so authoritative. I did get quicker off the mark as the years went on and managed to beat him to the punch from time to time.
(On a side note, The Twilight Zone and the Evening News broadcasts are directly responsible for me choosing a career in television. I needed to be able to put on some shows I wanted to see instead of being forced into fear or having only Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley as the evenings’ options. It’s ironic that most of my 36 year career has ended up being news related. It’s even more ironic how much the news and The Twilight Zone actually have in common. Yes, I was one of the children watching when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald live on television — or should I say shot dead?)
Still, The Omen totally changed my life in just a couple of hours.
I didn’t scream.
I didn’t squeal to my mom.
I didn’t even talk much more that day.
The Omen engendered a very thoughtful period.
For one, I became waaaay more interested in praying. I further recognized that even a huge fork to the head isn’t necessarily enough to fell a deranged person committed to an evil cause. Plus, I became fully aware that if it is your time to go, be it decapitation by a sliding sheet of glass or a spire from the top of a church steeple so accurately hit by lightning from a sudden storm on a dry day that it flies up into the air and comes down at the exact right angle to spear you in your neck, regardless of how freak the occurrence, you will meet your end. I also started unconsciously avoiding the number six, even if it was just one six standing alone.
In the other horror flicks where people do things to themselves, like trying to hop across six feet of the basement from one chamber to another in a crazy experiment only to end up exchanging parts with a fly, I can easily dismiss their outcome to overzealous behavior. One successful experiment with a cat does not make for proper clinical trials before putting yourself into the device.
Also, in the case of things like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, the antagonists, while very carefully hidden for plot development until the end, all got what they deserved…be it rat on a bed of lettuce or massive concrete mansion adornment to the head…they asked for it when they thought they were going to put one over on Bette Davis.
The Omen was a devil movie though and that was the distinction for me at 16.
Even now, I periodically find myself squeezing the lever of the gas nozzle to spin the dials to avoid hitting a six on the display. I’ve passed up openings in parking lots with numbered spaces. If something adds up to six, I look at it a little more cautiously than I would any of the other digits.
The way I see it though, six is just another thing to distract me from the reality of my day and six isn’t going anywhere so I need to learn to live with it. Just like so many other things in life, our reactions to them make the difference.
Trust me, if I receive a check for $666 it will be put into my bank account and hopefully meet other dollars there so it can change into some other number.