#RWISA “RISE-UP” TOUR, DAY 2, WANDA FISCHER @WandaFischer, @RRBC_ORG @RRBC_RWISA @TWEETS4RWISA #RRBC

DEFINITELY A MAD WORLD

by Wanda A. Fischer

One hot summer night in 1963, my sisters and I piled into the family station wagon with our mother. Our dad was working somewhere in another state, as he often did, as a construction worker. He essentially had to go where the jobs were back then, and sometimes that meant the Midwest or even Canada.

We must have been driving her “up the wall,” as her favorite expression went, so she decided we’d go to the local drive-in movie theater. My two sisters, Patty and Ginny, were much younger than I am. Patty was ten and Ginny was five. They still wore. Their pajamas to the drive-in, even sporting them when they went on the drive-in’s swings before the movie started. Ma knew they’d fall asleep before the main show started; they’d be awake while the warm-up cartoon played.

As an almost fifteen-year-old, though, I would be staying awake through the entire show. She let me sit in the front passenger seat. The rusty-gray drive-in speaker hung next to Ma’s left ear, but she turned it up loud enough so that we all could hear what was being projected onto the screen.

Before the sun went down, she sent me to the snack bar to load up on goodies for everyone in the car. Popcorn, Hershey bars, soda, and a hot dog for Ma. We settled in, with Patty and Ginny, in their pajamas, having put the back seats down in the station wagon and constructed a make-shift bed, waiting for the cartoon. They leaned into the two front seats, popcorn breath beating down on Ma and me, as some Looney Tune characters sped across the big screen.

Ma sat in her usual driver’s-side set, smoking one cigarette after another. She knew I hated cigarette smoke, but her motto was always that it was her car, her snack money, and she could do whatever she wanted. I cranked down the passenger-side window to get a little air inside the car. I hated cigarette smoke; in fact, Ma always said that my first sentence, when I was a toddler, was, “I hate cigarettes!”

Then the main feature movie came on the screen: “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” Sidney Kramer’s zany comedy about a trans-America car chase where some of the biggest names in stage and screen sought buried treasure. Spencer Tracey, Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney, Ethel Merman, Phil Silvers, Sid Cesar, Edie Adams, Terry Thomas, and more. At first, they determined to split the money, until they screamed, “Every man for himself!” as they jumped into their various vehicles and racked up miles across the country.

I had never seen my mother laugh as hard as she did when she watched that movie. The station wagon was rocking so hard from her laughter, I’m sure passersby must have had a different impression about what was happening inside. She even forgot to keep lighting cigarettes, she was so glued to the screen, as Terry Thomas sported an old-time flying helmet and goggles and crashed a single-engine airplane into a wooden tower while attempting to beat the others to the treasure.

She had tears in her eyes from laughing so hard. She could barely catch her breath at times when looking at the crazy antics on the drive-in’s giant screen, as vehicles kicked up dust in the desert or crashed into one another along dirt roads. At one point, a large map (remember maps?) flew into the eyes of one of the drivers as he increased his speed and couldn’t see in front of him.

My mother’s friends had always told me that she was the life of the party when she was young, that she was a laugher and giggler whenever they went out before they all had children. She wasn’t someone who drank alcohol (but she surely could smoke up a storm). She married young, at age 18, had her first child (me) when she was barely twenty, and struggled throughout her life financially. She was one of the only women in our neighborhood who had a full-time job outside the home when I was growing up, having taken a job when I was just two years old.

Money had always been tight in our house when I was young. By the time Patty and Ginny were older, things got better financially for my parents. I will always remember how happy my mother was, that night at the drive-in, watching “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” I think it was just the right night, just the right place, and we three children were just the right dates for her when Dad was out of town, so that she could have fun with people who thought they could get rich quickly by beating out their friends in a race few people ever win.

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