While skimming my backlog of blog post this morning, I happened upon one about velociraptors and memory lane by the talented and wildly entertaining Joshilyn Jackson. {It’s hilarious. Go read it. And add her blog to your reader. For reals.} I ended up writing up an exceptionally long-winded comment, so I figured I might as well elaborate some more and share my Jurassic Park memory with y’all.

Unless you live under a non-fossilized rock, you must know Jurassic Park is back on the big screen IN  3D. As much as the original is one of my favorite movies of all time and certainly up there with best book-to-big screen adaptations, I think I’m far too lily-livered to handle it in 3D.  I need an airsick bag to sit through a 3D movie anyway, but all I can think about is:

That, and I still hear impact tremors on a regular basis. {*see below}

Flashback 1993:  It was a hell of a summer. I was a pirate by day, rebel by night. Okay, technically I was a  participant in the coveted Disney Internship Program. I worked 40 hours a week hocking plastic swords to tourists while dressed in an itchy and HOT polyester pirate costume. I was an 18-year-old minimum wage slave who knew everything and refused to appreciate the experience as much as I should have. (Please see the enlightening Hanging Mickey Mouse post.)

Don’t laugh too hard. Told you the pants were horrid.

After my shifts (which could run until well after midnight) I’d eek out a corner in my overcrowded apartment and read. I can vividly remember sitting on the smoke-crusted couch reading Jurassic Park while my five roommates were all miraculously absent (work? partying? bleeding the kegs at work dry?). I was a stranger in a world where I was brainwashed to believe in make-believe. And that book scared the crap out of me. It was riveting. It was terrifying. It was bloody brilliant.

And I’m allowed to use the English slang, as one of my roommates was a Brit. Two were from France, another from Mexico, and one from Lima, Ohio, which seemed as peculiar and far away as all of the others combined. FYI: All the cast members in EPOCT’s World Showcase are actually from the countries they represent on job internship programs (at least they were back then). If you participated in the restaurant management internship program, you sold Guiness at the U.K. beer stand. You looked cute and sounded authentic while spending the year in sunny Florida. What a deal.

I devoured that book faster than a velociraptor snarfed down a cow.  I dragged my roommates to the ginormous movie theater at Downtown Disney opening weekend. The house was packed—full of tourists mostly.

 Let me tell you, fear needs no translation.

I may still have some faint scars on my forearm from Ohio roommate’s fingernails. There’s something about hundreds of people from all over the world yelping and gasping in unison. It was like a perfectly composed symphony of screams, as if we just all flocked together like those veggie-eater dinosaurs running through the plains. Remember: this was in the days when we still felt safe in a crowded movie theater, when we believed the terror was all make-believe.

I know the moment I cried out the loudest, the quote that dug it’s claws into my psyche.

Nope, not when the T. rex tried to eat the kids in the car, or when the raptors chased down spunky Laura Dern, or even during the electric “must go faster” scene.

At one point, that sexy, snarky geek Jeff Goldblum might as well have pointed his finger to me in the audience and dragged me into the film:

John Hammond:All major theme parks have delays. When they opened Disneyland in 1956, nothing worked!

Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, but, John, if The Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.

I couldn’t escape my indentured servitude at Pirates of the Caribbean even during my brief periods of repreive. They knew I was there, watching. And if that much of my real life was invested in the story, well maybe, just maybe dinosaurs could be real too…

No. Not possible. Beyond even the most brilliant geneticists imaginations, right?  Right?

*Twenty years later, I live just close enough to the theme parks to occasionally hear a distant rumble. It’s barely audible, and I only notice it on spring or fall nights when the windows are open and the air fluctuates to just the right density to carry the deep rolling sound. Each time, my ears perk up, my book goes down, and force myself not to say aloud, “You hear that? Impact tremors.”*

As if somewhere in the wilds of suburbia, a T. rex roams in search of dinner. (Hey, wait a minute…didn’t they do that in Jurassic Park 2 or 3?  Ugh-oh.)  At some point my deluded sense of reality kicks in and I realize it’s just distant summer thunder or the faint booms of theme park fireworks.

But no one can say I have a bland imagination.




I’d say that book and movie left a lasting impression. Thank you Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg. Your creations will prowl the border of my suspension of disbelief forever.

Maybe Jurassic Park would be worth the nausea to watch in 3D. Should I take the kiddo? All kids need a complex, right?