[jdviole2]

I know I have mentioned before that Helena was a movie fan. She loved going to the movies. Early in our marriage we went to a movie almost every weekend. There are people who can only watch a movie once and never again. That was not Helena, she could watch movies again and again. Her early movie going experiences were around Shirley Temple. She just loved Shirley. In fact since I began painting and drawing portraits she only requested one from me, and that was Shirley Temple. (I could have shot her, those damn curls took forever). We bought one of the first VHS player/recorders on the market. I bought some of her favorite movies on tape for her so she could see them whenever she wanted. Though she started her love of movies planted firmly in the "kiddie" realm she didn't stay there. One of our first outings after we got married, before I had to return to Italy was to go to a movie. I asked her what movie she wanted to see. She didn't say at first. I couldn't imagine what the hell she wanted to see that was that bad. Turns out she wanted to see The Exorcist. (Hey I grew up on Saturday night Creature Features so that suited me fine) My mom gave me hell when she found out. She felt that was totally inappropriate for my new wife. I never did tell her it was Helena's idea. She grew to love scary movies. She had limits though. She didn't like "wet" movies (her term for overly bloody movies). We went to scary movies, musicals, dramas, comedys. Thankfully she didn't like Romantic Comedy/Drama movies so I was spared having to see that junk. She especially liked the scary ones though. I remember when we went to see the original Halloween. There is a scene where the heroine escapes from the house and Michael Meyers is chasing her. She is trying to get into the house across the street and the kids aren't unlocking the door. The bad guy gets closer and closer. I felt something moving beside me and when I looked I saw Helena had drawn her feet up off the floor and was trying to run herself. Kind of like when a dog dreams he is chasing a animal and his legs move like they are running. She really got into the movies. She also loved comedy movies. She didn't like the sophisticated type of comedy though. Give her a good fart routine and she couldn't stop laughing. As the technology moved ahead so did we. We had a laser disc player (sort of a forerunner to DVD). We bought a DVD player. I made it a tradition that each time she had to spend time in the hospital I would upgrade her TV/Video before she came home. Her TV screens got bigger and bigger. High Definition Blu-ray players came on the scene and we bought in. Each upgrade I would replace her favorite movies with the newer technology. As the years went by her hearing faded a little. She never needed a hearing aid but wanted the sound on the TV played pretty high. So high in fact that we blew her speakers out. I replaced the speakers with new/bigger/stronger ones and promptly blew out the amplifier. So I replaced that. She had a pretty much state of the art system by the time we were finished. She professed to hate "old" movies. What she meant was Black and White movies. For some reason she thought they all sucked. I would occasionally start a black and white movie and ask her to just watch 10 minutes of it. Usually she would stay for the whole movie and love it, but she still would tell people that she hated "old" movies. When she came home for the last time from the nursing home I had been downloading movies for a year or so. For the next 12 months she would name a movie she wanted to see and if we didn't have it (and we had over 1500 titles, both movies and TV shows on disc) we would rent or buy it online. The last two months she was alive she drew into herself a lot and finally settled on only one movie that she watched everyday. (Heaven help me it was a Disney film the old Pollyanna). The single exception was just a week before I had to put her into Hospice. I told her we were going to watch A Million Ways To Die In The West. It is a comedy and there is an extended scene where a gunfight goes wrong when the bad guy has uncontrollable diarrhea. I didn't even know if she was aware of what she was watching or not when I heard her making a strange noise. When I listened more closely I realized that she was laughing at the bad guy. Movies were a big part of her life and something that we shared. I tried to watch one of our favorites last week but couldn't. Not yet. It is still too soon. In our first house we had a lounge type of chair that we both could sit in when we watched TV. That was a fun chair. We could cuddle and smooch during the dull parts of the movie. Our new house didn't have a place for that chair so we had separate chairs. Not as much fun. That "banana chair" as Helena called it was where I learned a valuable lesson. The lesson was that if you tickle a very ticklish woman, and she tells you to stop or she is going to pee, you'd better listen to her. I didn't and got my first and only "golden shower" from my wife. From that day on when ever I would start to tickle her she would just say the words "banana chair" and I would stop immediately. Funny isn't it the places that your mind takes you. I started with movies and ended up wearing a urine soaked jogging suit. So on to todays pictures. Helena's favorite movie star, even more that Shirley Temple, was Marilyn Monroe. This is a picture of her taken outside of the Hollywood Wax Museum with a statue of Marilyn This was in Hollywood in 1977. Next we have two of Helena taken by her dad. The second of today's pictures is from her Graduation Photo shoot. The next shot is Helena in a long dress (very rare) taken in 1974. The fourth shot today was a surprise to me and hopefully will be to you as well. It is another "Helena nude in the bathtub" shot. I don't have the slightest idea which motel this was taken in or when it was taken. Sorry. The fifth picture is Helena resting at 11,000 feet just at the treeline on her way to Blue Lake, her favorite lake in the Rocky Mountains. This was probably in the early 80's. The last picture is another recently discovered portrait. Probably from the mid 70's.