What Do You Do When You Stay-Home Alone?

Home Alone was a 1990 family-comedy movie. Now we are all living it and we must stay-home alone too.

home alone poster. fair use. 20th Century Fox
Home Alone poster. fair use, 20th Century Fox

“When bratty 8-year-old Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin – now age 39, and not much part of the current Hollywood scene) acts out the night before a family trip to Paris, his mother (Catherine O’Hara) makes him sleep in the attic. After the McCallisters mistakenly leave for the airport without Kevin, he awakens to an empty house and assumes his wish to have no family has come true. But his excitement sours when he realizes that two con men (Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern) plan to rob the McCallister residence, and that he alone must protect the family’s home.” – IMDB.

So what do I, a California resident, do in the many hours of stay, home alone?

To refresh my vitals and mind I take a 3-mile walk-jog each day in the empty streets of Los Angeles. The only people, just about, I come across are homeless people who practice the stay home quarantine decree in their home, the streets.

I listen much to radio programs, watch TV and read, all in order to be on top of the news, now mostly related to the Coronavirus pandemic crisis.

It appears that all other steady news we are accustomed to hearing, has been frozen and disappeared as each country is battling to contain the virus that, like fire, is extinguished in one part of the country to only appear elsewhere.

I also grease my mind with much thinking, why, how, what, and if and what will happen when it is all over. What the future holds. Admiringly, it is worrisome and tiring.

Additionally, I put my thought into penning. Since there is no one to talk with, I speak through my computer keyboard.

And now, more than ever, I use my TV remote apparatus to search for movies to distract me. And there are many oldies now showing on many channels.

And so, the other day when clicking on the remote apparatus I happened to come across the movie Rocky. I think I watched Rocky III (1982) or Rocky IV (1985) in the 1976-2006 seven films series. Watching the movie gave me a perspective notion what society was like then, what would then make a great prize-winning movie and how life has changed.

Last night I watched the movie Top Gun, a 1986 action-romance movie about a ‘Top Gun Naval Fighter Weapons School where the best of the best pilots train to refine their elite flying skills. When hotshot, self-aggrandizing fighter pilot Maverick (Tom Cruise) is sent to the school, his reckless attitude and cocky demeanor put him at odds with all the other classmates’ pilots, especially the cool and collected Iceman (Val Kilmer). But he isn’t only competing to be the top fighter pilot, he’s also fighting for the attention of his beautiful flight instructor, Charlotte Blackwood (Kelly McGillis).

Top Gun poster. fair use, Parmount Pictures.
Top Gun poster. fair use, Parmount Pictures.

In the film, the main actor Tom Cruise, strong and compact, with a gorgeous smile, is young and intriguing and very attractive to the opposite sex. Cruise’s instructor the young Kelly McGillis, nowadays 62 years-old, is definitely not the blond perfectly shaped blue eyes instructor with whom Cruise couples.

Other film crew members, like Val Kilmer and Meg Ryan went on to gain Hollywood fame and other actors have disappeared or are unknown to me.

But, the point I am writing this piece is the social interaction the film portrays what society may have lost due to the Coronavirus.

In the film they closely interact; they do not keep a social distance. They closely sit in class, they hug when they meet, they have close interaction when gathering and they sit at the bar, at a restaurant or at an airport totally unafraid to catch a virus. Pandemic has not been known to the world since the 1918 Spanish Flu and the world has taken it for granted.

Similarly to Coronavirus-Covid-19, the Spanish flu was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic that lasted from January 1918 to December 1920. The pandemic infected 500 million people – about a quarter of the world’s population at the time with 50,000,000 death toll.

What Do You Do When You Stay-Home Alone? 1
Spanish Flu hospital scene – Photo credit Wikipedia.org

The Cruise-MeGillis duo, who are smitten with each other when she admits “I have fallen for you,” do not hesitate to instinctively hug and kiss and fall into bed and have intensive sexual relations without having to worry that they may carry a virus or a disease. Until February 2020, such an idea was not anyone’s mind but China that did not share news of this health threat with the world.

I was watching the Top Gun movie and I was wondering, will our world ever get back to that social interaction point again, humanity has been so accustomed to it and liked it so much, or we have forever lost it. Must we always stay-home alone?

Will the “old normalcy” return?

I don't want to stay-home alone. image by NewsBlaze
I don’t want to stay home alone. image by NewsBlaze.

During the 2006 second Lebanon War, Nurit Greenger, referenced then as the “Accidental Reporter” felt compelled to become an activist. Being an ‘out-of-the-box thinker, Nurit is a passionately committed advocate for Jews, Israel, the United States, and the Free World in general. From Southern California, Nurit serves as a “one-woman Hasbarah army” for Israel who believes that if you stand for nothing, you will fall for anything.

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