It Came from the Attic > JAWS: The Junky Gift Shop Souvenir

Despite being old enough to own my own house, I still have a ton of junk in my parents’ attic. I’m slowly moving all of that stuff to my home. Occasionally I come across something fun, weird or amusing from my past. It Came From the Attic is a series of posts about these odds and ends.

In the early 1990s, my parents took my sister and I to Florida for an extended vacation that included a visit to both Disney World and Universal Studios Orlando (I think we hit Sea World, too).* Then, as now, my favorite movie was JAWS and I was obsessed with great white sharks in general.

While I must admit my favorite ride was, of course, Star Tours, I still got a rush out of the JAWS ride (now sadly decommissioned). Of course, I came out of the experience and headed straight to the store looking for anything even remotely toy-like related to it. This is something I still do today, of course (it doesn’t always work; I have yet to find toys at Pearl Jam concerts or dentist offices).

In the case of the JAWS ride, all I found was this thing:

You’ll find this picture in the dictionary under “gewgaw (cf: knick-knack, bauble, tchotchke).”

Look at the definition! The expertly-crafted upper bodies of the doomed tourists! The gills sculpted high on the back of the head in trenchant defiance of nature! The red paint around the lips that was obviously smeared on by a sweatshop worker the day after losing three fingers in a shop accident!

Believe it or not, this ugly little gimcrack ended up serving a useful purpose in my life. During high school, whenever I needed to remind myself to do something in the morning – finish my homework, call a friend, bring a certain book to school – I put this on my nightstand. When I woke, my first thought was always “Why is this incredibly tacky piece of crap here?” which was quickly answered by whatever I wanted to remind myself of.

Years and years later – this past year, to be exact – it occurred to me that my thirtysomething brain might have even more use for something like this (say nothing, $300 Iphone and your myriad reminder apps!), so I dug it out of my attic where it had been living for half my life. Now that the ride is gone, it’s actually a somewhat poignant little artifact.

*I believe this was also the occasion of the infamous Bubble Tape Incident. My sister is four years younger than me, and while I never begrudged my sister taking some of my parents’ attention – more than some, oftentimes – I did mind when she touched my stuff. My parents’ efforts to make me share with my little sis just never took. At one point during this vacation, I had some Bubble Tape – which, for those who don’t know, is a container of six feet of bubble gum – and for whatever reason, I chose this instance to stand my ground and angrily refused to give my sister even one piece. I definitely remember I had some adolescent sense of “it’s the principle of the thing,” but ultimately this is not something I’m proud of.