The Littlest Snake Plissken

I woke up at 4 am this morning to go to the bathroom, and caught the glow of the teevee on in the downstairs living room.  I crept down and spotted my ten-year-old, Little One, wrapped in a blanket on the couch watching cartoons.

“Can’t sleep?” I asked.

“No,” she said in a quiet voice.

I thought a moment.  “Wanna watch the rest of Escape from New York?”

I DVR’d the famous 1981 John Carpenter flick – starring Kurt Russell as the immortal Snake Plissken – a few days ago and wrestled whether ten was the appropriate age to introduce my daughter to this classic piece of sci fi cinema that is part of the long chain of media that created the warped artist known as her dad. 

Though the wife strongly was against it, on Friday evening I decided to watch the first twenty minutes with my little one to test it out, after we had finished watching another classic, 1954’s Them!  She handled it like a champ, cracking some downright funny jokes and pulling off a real mean Snake Plissken impression.

She brightened at my suggestion: “Okay!”

So at 4:15 am on Sunday morning, pitch black and below freezing outside, we laid some pillows and blankets on the floor and watched the last hour-and-a-half of Escape from New York.  Ah, memories!

One of the iconic lines in the movie is the dialogue between Snake and Houk, the man who drives the hard bargain to force Snake into the prison city of New York to retrieve the President of the United States.  “Call me Snake,” Snake says, in the coolest, baddest whisper-snarl you’ve ever heard.  At the end of the flick, after Snake screws back Houk, he leaves with a “Call me Plissken.”

At lunchtime earlier today, as I was picking up my deli order, I turned and said, “Let’s go, Little One.”

“Call me Hamster Luvr 999,” she said in a menacing whisper.  “And that’s Luvr spelled L-U-V-R …”