Post 1: Spoiler Alert

For me, summer is about movies. Ever since I was young, movies were a staple of happiness. Having grown up in what felt like the world's smallest town, I itched for adventure and love like I saw depicted in movies. I spent the bulk of my adolescence building a cache of quotes, plots, and portals to other worlds in my head.

So many of my favorite memories are related to my love of movies from my first slumber party, and my first kiss, to meeting my husband and so many moments in between. Movies are my happy place.

My favorite summer of all time was the year I got to make my living solely by talking on the radio with hours between shifts to walk and watch movies. I was living in Bangor, Maine on Union Street with Stephen King as my neighbor one street up. One of my regular listeners would call in daily and regale me with tales of working for Stephen King and I didn't hide that I wasn’t very impressed. I was a movie lover and books had never made quite the same impact on me because my eyes were terrible and reading was laborious. He smartly quipped that it didn’t matter what I loved most when it came to Stephen King because his movies were just as good as his books. Through our banter, he inspired me to read IT.

My boyfriend at the time had grown up in the Bangor area and knew all the places that were the inspirations for the story, even the ones that weren’t super obvious. Many of them were on my walking route in my neighborhood… The Thomas Hill Standpipe, The Barrens, Jackson Street, and the Paul Bunyon statue were all along my route. Thus began the endeavor of reading IT (thanks to the magic of Audiobooks) while walking around the neighborhood like a time traveler. I fell even more in love with Bangor that summer and became completely smitten with Stephen King and the way that he builds a story.

When I finally finished the book in early September my boyfriend planned an IT themed date to celebrate my birthday. We did the IT walking tour I’d come to love then went to the Oriental Jade for dinner. Our fortune cookies hatched exactly zero creatures and I was thoroughly disappointed… After dinner we went back to his apartment where he had the IT miniseries cued up and I experienced a movie in a way that I never had before.

Jade of the Orient- Derry, ME

Summer was made for memory-making and until I got married 10 summers later, I never made memories quite like I did in Bangor in 2006. Weirdly enough the same year we were married, IT was re-imagined again during filming in Toronto and I got to again have this story be part of my birthday celebration when the first part was released in September 2017.

When we saw part 1 two years ago, I had a job as a photographer that I loved and was volunteering to organize the Walk to End Alzheimer’s in Waterville.

Sitting and watching IT Chapter 2, earlier this month I couldn’t help but marvel at how much has changed in these two years. The company I photographed for relocated to Pennsylvania, I am now a paid staff member at the Alzheimer's Association helping to plan all the Walks to End Alzheimer’s in Maine and Gram has progressed to where she sees people who aren’t there.

The reviews for IT Chapter 2 haven’t been all that remarkable. No one seems to be impressed quite the way I was. I was incredibly moved and brought to tears several times through the film and when the reviews did not reflect any of what I felt experiencing it, I realized that I saw something the reviewers hadn’t. Where they see a red balloon, I see a purple one. Where they see a diabolical clown, I see a very real monster that is consuming people I love. Where they see a movie, I see a horrible, scary, reality that is hard to comprehend when you can’t believe your eyes.

Stephen King is the king of fear and IT is the embodiment of the idea that fear is a unique enemy to us all. It customizes itself to fit snugly into the cracks in our lives. I thought his portrayal of this idea amid a setting of friendship, growing up, and going home was flawless in the book and I think the new film captures it beautifully as well.

I have experienced this story so many times over the years but I never truly understood what fear was to me until I began to see, as an adult, what Alzheimer’s is capable of. It hit me like a ton of bricks though, sitting in that theater. There is a scene where Bill Hader’s Richie Tozier has a flashback to Stan’s bar mitzva. The speech that the adolescent Stanley Uris gives struck a chord with me and for the rest of the film I couldn’t help but see Pennywise as a diagnosis. It changed my entire experience.

For the rest of the film, everything had a purple haze around it. It was like I was watching a story told from the perspective of someone who had Alzheimer’s. When I noticed a hole in the plot I was instantly forgiving in the exact same way that I react when Gram tells me a story that I know isn’t completely true but her overall point is there.

Even the name of their friend group, The Losers Club, was different to me now. To them "Loser" is a cheeky way to label their misfit selves. I always related to that but now I feel like a "Loser" in the way that I am on track to lose my memories, my personality, my Grandmother and so much more because of the evil that is Alzheimer’s.

When Alzheimer’s touches your life you know loss like no one can quite explain. Every day you are losing something, whether it is the neurons of a dying brain, patience as a caregiver, or pieces of a relationship that you treasured. In this way I feel like I belong to a Loser’s Club of my own and this blog is where we convene.

Memory and recollection have been key to the unfolding of this story since King wrote it the year after I was born. To kill IT the Loser’s Club has to come home again and remember all the things that they successfully kept hidden for most of their lives. They have to face their individual fears and shame, and do the unthinkable over and over. That’s Alzheimer’s. They have to stick together and have to be with each other in the darkness and they don’t all make it out alive. IT is Alzheimer’s.

King’s Loser’s Club takes 3 tries to actually kill Pennywise. The first as kids, the second as adults when it doesn’t work because they believe he can’t be killed and finally, after losing friends, they finally succeed by coming together and telling IT that they don’t believe he is scary. They take away his power by not letting the fear they feel drive who they are and what they do. Pennywise, like shame and fear, can only get you if you don’t talk about it and you face it alone.

Mohammad Ali’s coach used to say something to the effect that the brave and the cowardly feel the same fear but the hero reacts to IT differently. The Loser’s Club are heroes because they faced those deadlights together and over 27 years collectively react in a way that deflates the balloon that keeps fear floating down here. I think the end of Alzheimer’s needs the same treatment.

From here on out I am looking at the fundraising I do to help fuel the mission of finding a world without Alzheimer’s they way the Loser’s Club looked at killing IT. I need friends to do this with me and I need them to believe that we can win.

Some of us may not make it out the other side but I know that if we can find the courage to move forward even when we are paralyzed by fear then we will defy the impossible and we will kill the purple Pennywise.

I hope that when you see an appeal for a donation on my social media or in this blog you will see that as me asking you to believe. Asking you to hold our hands, love us where we are right now, and fight these purple deadlights that we are all terrified of.

Welcome to the Purple Loser’s Club my Friends.

#bloggingtips #WixBlog #StephenKing #it #endalz #believe