That's Not Madonna! or Things You Didn't Want to Know About Your Grandparents

As you may or may not know, MK's grandfather passed away a little over a month ago. We have been doing a lot of traveling back and forth from our place to his to deal with various things, which is part of the reason my blogging has been so sporadic recently. But let's see if we can turn a sad intro into an amusing story (this could be offensive to the very sensitive and/or humorless).

One of the things we have been doing is helping her aunt deal with the accumulation of stuff that we all leave behind when we pass on. Sorting into various piles: keep this, throw that away, burn or shred that, sell that and so on. Her aunt had arranged for an estate sale to deal with all of what was remaining after keepsakes and anything with memories had been given to the family. They told her to just leave everything, and they would deal with it all. During the course of one conversation with them she said, "So, umm...my father was a bit of a pervert...I wasn't sure with all these videos..." "Oh yeah, just leave it," they replied, "we'll sell them." These aren't Showtime or even Skinemax After Dark type films--we're talking full-blown hardcore videos. Right, now picture the same situation with your own grandfather and you begin to see what's going on.

Fortunately, this did not come as a complete surprise to most of the family, so no one was too traumatized by learning this after his death. Everyone has known to one extent or another for years. In fact, MK has known about this since she was in high school. She was housesitting (along with a friend of hers) for her grandparents while they were out of town. One day, they realized that if they wanted to record General Hospital while they were in school, they would need a tape. The search was on. Eventually they turned up an unmarked case with a simple VHS cassette which had a typewritten label on the spine reading "Like a Virgin." Not sure why her grandparents would have need of a Madonna video, they decided that this would be an acceptable tape for recording soap operas. They were sorely mistaken.

Sadly, when they put the tape into the VCR they were not greeted with Madonna but with a rather explicit movie (look, IMDB even has a page for it). How did she react? Well, consider how you would feel as a high schooler finding a movie like that in your grandparents' living room. Now let's make it worse. When her grandparents arrived back home they greeted her and MK's grandfather asked, "So, did you guys watch any movies?" The response? "Nope, nothing at all," followed by running from the house.

A few weeks ago, as we were going through things in the living room, we opened the drawer containing VHS tapes, and there sat right between the Charles Bronson movies and The Glenn Miller Story.

Until later...