The house from E.T. backs up to the steep and extraordinary San Gabriel mountain range in Tujunga, CA. We had the chance to see it recently under a blue afternoon sky which was more than exciting and a little surreal. This picture was taken the week of Christmas 2018.Whenever I am visiting one of these iconic Gen X places, like one that I first saw on the silver screen in my most formative years, my heart speeds up and I feel like some kind of electricity is connecting time and space in the ground below my feet.
Below is me in my Atari shirt in front of the house rocking it like it's 1982. I was born the same year as Drew Barrymore, so I looked a lot like her with the exact same string-tied blond pigtails when I saw the movie. She and Henry Thomas became a part of our hearts the first moment we all saw them in this house.
Decades have passed and the house hasn't changed much. These trees were just seeds in the ground as the film was being made - this was a brand new neighborhood at the time of the filming. These trees grew up as Gen X did.
When we arrived at this suburb, it looked instantly recognizable as the place where Elliott and company trick-or-treated all those years ago. It felt strangely and unexpectedly bittersweet,
like I was visiting one of my old neighborhoods.
After we went and saw the house, the kiddos watched a viewing of E.T. in our friends' Burbank home theater while we had dinner and wine. On their tree was an ornament that was bought right after the movie came out. Another little unexpected snapshot of history to end a perfect day.
This was the gift box I put together before the trip to thank our friends for inviting us over (and for the kids to snack on during the movie). I took an empty box that had been full of Hallmark Christmas cards, put in some Reese's Pieces, and small cans of soda. I put in some microwave popcorn and my daughter drew and colored a Speak & Spell and taped it to the front. I cut out a white piece of construction paper for the moon and used a black marker for the trees.
Here's to every magical moment we experienced as a generation. Here's to the greatness of story and how our own stories are a part of a greater collective story. As the last light-filled moments of the holiday season linger on, and as a new year begins, here's to hope that at any given moment, between the flicker of the stars, the universe may reach out to us in a way we never would have expected.
For M.B.
As a fun tidbit:
Later the same year the movie came out, the Atari game for E.T. wasn't exactly what everyone had hoped for since the programmer didn't have much time to work on it, and the overstock of hundreds of cartridges were buried for years in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. A few years back, many of the games were pulled back out and sold on eBay. Read more here: CNN Article on buried E.T. Atari games
(c) 2019 all rights reserved, pictures by Chloe and Telly Koffas
