She took me to my first movie in the theatre, Walt Disney's 1967 adaptation of The Jungle Book. I would have been three. One of my sisters told me it was like TV, but bigger and without commercials. My brother came with us, but he was by then a movie theatre veteran.
She would have been twenty-three. She wanted to see the movie, though, if only because Louis Prima did the cartoon ape and the vultures were supposed to be based on the Beatles. I did not know these things then. I rewatched the film years later. The vultures do a bad impersonation of Beatles banter in Liverpudlian accents. They have fab mop-top feathers. They sing, however, something closer to barbershop. Disney was less hip then. All I recalled from '67 were some of the songs, vaguely, the fact that I thought the bear was funny, and that it seemed a little sad to me when Mowgli left the jungle to join the unnamed girl at the end and follow her to civilization.
She was my mother's sister, fourteen years younger. Her high school years would gap the late 1950s and early 1960s, prime teenage years as North American pop culture figures it. Her beau, a big, boisterous, athletic guy with the ironic-seeming nickname "Pee Wee" used to drive them around in a convertible. She wore cat's eye glasses. Even as a kid, I knew they'd been cool. They married, had a son and a daughter, and lived their lives.
She passed away last week. Our families remained close for many years, but it has been many years since I've seen them. My aunt has struggled with Alzheimer's this last decade.
One of my sisters contacted me this week with the inevitable news.
Requiescat in pace.