Dear readers,

The movie Everything Everywhere All At Once” was the big winner last Sunday at the 95^th Academy Awards. Unlike some recent years, I have seen the movie. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can keep reading. I don’t think I understood the movie enough to spoil it for you.

Years ago, Orson Wells directed his wife Rita Hayworth in the movie “Lady from Shanghai.” To connoisseurs of film noir, it is revered as a brilliant, hallucinatory treat for the senses. However, some found it difficult to follow.

When Harry Cohn, the president of the studio that made the movie first saw it, he said, “I’ll give anyone in this room $1,000 if they can explain the storyline.”

I felt like Cohn after I saw Everything Everywhere All At Once.

If you intend to see the movie, pay close attention from the very beginning. It’s not one of those shows where you wait most of the movie before anything of consequence happens. Remember what Rod Serling always said, “You are about to enter another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wonderous land of imagination.”

Everything Everywhere All At Once has not only brought in $100 million at the box office, but the props used in the movie have already brought in big money at auction. The hot dog hands went for $55,000 and even the rock with googly eyes brought $13,500.

I was telling my sister, Karen, about the hot dog hands bringing big bucks and she said, “I wonder what your six-finger toy is worth.” 

I hadn’t thought about my six-finger in years. Karen is the collector in the family in charge of all Meltzer antiquities. She retrieved it from a box marked “Toys, Might Lose an Eye.”

Wow, I hadn’t seen my six-finger in years. It looks just like a finger, but it has a hole in the end where little projectiles are spring loaded. It does come with the following warning: “Do Not Aim at Human Targets.”

I can tell you from experience that 12-year-old boys did not heed the warning.

Karen had saved all the attachments. Six-Finger did the following:

• Shoot a cap bomb
• Send an S-O-S
• Write messages with hidden ballpoint pen
• Fire a secret bullet
• Shoot a message missile
• Fire a fragmentation bomb

Six-Finger was made by a company named Topper which also made the Johnny Seven One Man Army. It was guaranteed to “Stop Communism Dead in Its Tracks.” It shoots even more projectiles. I also had one of those.

I couldn’t wait to get home with my new/old toy. Boy, my wife, Sandy, was going to be surprised. I first made a quick stop at Builder’s Lumber and Hardware to buy her some safety glasses.

Sandy is a good sport. I shot her a message missile every time I needed the TV channel changed. I hit her with an S-O-S projectile whenever I was hungry. The fun only lasted a couple of hours. Sandy claims that I must have already misplaced my Six-Finger, but I think she has hidden it. Maybe she saw how much the hot dog hands brought and sold it.

Either way, I don’t mind. I’m headed out to my sister’s house to pick up my Johnny Seven One Man Army gun. After all, Sandy still has those new safety glasses.

See you all next week, same Schwinn time, same Schwinn channel.

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