Anyone Remember the Movie Ice Castles?

 January 22, 2022

I gave my students several prompts to choose from to write some literacy narratives: stories about the way in which people, moments, or events helped shape their sense of themselves as readers and writers.  I thought I'd write to a couple of the prompts along with them.

When I was in sixth grade, we had a competition for reading in my class.  My district was very competition-driven.  My teacher, who was a hiking fanatic, had a giant butcher paper, snow-capped mountain covering the wall behind his desk, and each student was represented by a tiny push pin with our names affixed like tiny banners.  We had a goal of a certain number of books to read by the end of the semester, and each week our little push pins would journey farther up the mountain in increments that correlated to the numbers of books we had read. The first person to meet their reading goal would summit the mountain and earn a prize.

The prize was one I can’t imagine being awarded in this day and age, but seemed perfectly reasonable then.  Our teacher would take the winner out for dinner and a movie in the theater.  The movie would be of our choosing.  As I said, our school was very competitive, and in particular there was a boy named Derek Woolverton in my class with whom I had the fiercest–although friendly–competition. We were both in the top reading group, and each of us was determined to summit the mountain first.  We read voraciously through the semester and maintained a neck-and-neck race all throughout.  There was another student who joined us at the top of the pack, and ultimately, the three of us summited in the same week.  There was a three-way tie for first place.  Our teacher decided it was only fair that all three of us would share the prize.

We debated  about the movie we would get to see.  Derek was loudly advocating for Star Wars.  I was not much interested.  I wanted to see Ice Castles, a love story about a competitive skater who overcomes tragedy with the help of her dedicated boyfriend.  I was able to sway our other competitor to my side, and Ice Castles won.  I am sure that our teacher would probably rather have seen Star Wars, but he allowed us to diplomatically decide among the three of us, rather than weighing in himself.

I don’t remember where we went to dinner that night, but getting to go out in the evening to a movie theater with my teacher and two classmates was a true reward.  Going to the theater at all was a rare treat back then. We felt like classroom celebrities–kind of a big deal when you are only ten years old.  Once there, we got a big bucket of popcorn to share and allowed ourselves to be enveloped by the darkness of the theater.  The music swelled, and the film came to life.  We were entranced–even Derek, who was won over by the experience and didn’t hold it against us that he wasn’t sitting in the theater watching Star Wars.

It was the days before the internet, and Nextflix, and the likes of HBO.  When we did watch films or television shows, it was almost always on the small screen on one of the three channels available to us at the time.  A real, larger-than-life movie was a novelty, and although I was engrossed in the film and it made me cry in all the places it was designed to tug at my heartstrings (yes, even back then I was an emotional and sentimental girl), one of the things that I can distinctly remember was that there was so much swearing.  It was a rated PG movie, but it was a 1970s PG, which meant PG encompassed a whole lot more language, nudity, and violence than the films of today.  This was even before the PG-13 designation came along, so the net was even wider for films that fell into this PG category.  I can remember clearly that it was almost as though there were two sides of myself watching–the one absolutely enjoying the storyline and the whole experience I had earned, and the other side that was very definitely worried that our teacher would get in trouble for bringing three young, impressionable kids to this movie.  My own parents didn’t swear at home, and this movie was probably the most swearing I had ever heard in a concentrated two hour block.  Although I wasn’t offended by it, I thought perhaps if my parents knew, they would get angry.

Ultimately, when I got dropped off at home and my mom asked me if I had enjoyed the evening, I told her all about it–sans the swearing.  She smiled and told me she was glad I had had a good time, and that she was proud of me for earning the reward, and then she sent me to bed.  It was late, and there was school in the morning.  The movie and the experience remained a treasured memory for me for a very long time, and the film remained one of my favorites for several years.  I had already been a dedicated reader by the time that competition came along, but being celebrated for it even further cemented my life-long love for it.