While looking for something entirely-unrelated, I came across this old post from 2006. I read the entire post that it's excerpted from on Radio Free Burrito 17, but this part made me smile, so it gets its own spot right here on my bloggy-blog-blog:
Though I've been there for several auditions, I haven't been on the Universal Studio Tour since A-Team and Knight Rider were in prime time.
I can mark that particular period of time with this degree of certainty, because I clearly recall talking with KITT, and wanting to ask it if it ever raced the A-Team van around the back lot, but actually asking something stupid about how fast it could go.
I also recall taking a scratch off game with me on the tour tram, where we were supposed to look for A-Team characters in various places, and scratch off the appropriate image on the map, with the promise of a prize for kids who turned in correctly completed games. I can't remember all of them, but Mr. T -- well, a model of Mr. T's head, anyway -- was in this out of control train that was supposed to come within inches of crashing into the tram, and I was so busy trying to figure out how they did it, I forgot to scratch him off . . . until the tour guide reminded all us kids to scratch off that circle on our map.
"That's stupid," I told my mom, "if they're just going to tell everyone where the A-Team is, why should we even look?"
"Maybe you can just enjoy the tour," she said.
2006 was a fantastic year for me as a writer. When I go through the 2005-2006 archives, I see a lot of creative writing and narrative non-fiction that I recall having a lot of fun writing, which remains a lot of fun for me to read today. I'm not entirely sure why that is, but I suspect a lot of it has to do with how much I was allowing myself to simply enjoy the tour.
