Misha Merrill

Hey.

I'm nervous.

Okay.

So...

When I was a kid, back in the 1990s, yeah, it's not that long ago, my mom used to take my sister and I over to Blockbuster Video, and she would say, go pick out any video you want, and then we'd pick it out, and we'd rent it, and we'd bring it home, and she would make a copy of that video for us to keep so we could watch it whenever we wanted.

Right, so that's illegal.

And we did it for many years.

And eventually Blockbuster kind of caught on and the VHS tapes would arrive with a sort of lock on them that prevented us from being able to copy them.

So we found another video store called New Concept Video

which was in Miami Beach, was a great local video store, and we started doing the same thing there.

And it was kind of a blessing because New Concept had this entirely different collection of movies, like all these eclectic independent movies and foreign films, and my mom was in heaven because she's a real film buff, and she could kind of culture my sister and I a little with all these eclectic movies.

So while she had her head buried in the indie film section, I wandered around as a nine or 10-year-old in this video store and found another section which had this partition with a red velvety curtain.

And I would poke my head through and see this ocean of just fleshy, just porn, it was porn.

And I was...

amazed and mesmerized because I mean not only you know is it amazing but it's also I was I had no idea what sex was because we didn't discuss these things in my family because despite the fact that like my parents are very open-minded and and my mother in particular I kind of think of her a little bit as like an Annie Hall like a real life Annie Hall she's she's very beautiful and very funny

and warm, but neurotic, and throws on like outfits that don't really work, but they look amazing on her.

So she's like that, but she's also Kurdish and Muslim.

So along with this Kurdish Muslimness comes a lot of other, you know, baggage, in my opinion, like especially, basically she's sexually repressed.

So we didn't talk about sex growing up, and she protected us a lot from that conversation, which meant that these videos that she was copying, she wouldn't just copy them, she'd also edit them.

censoring out anything that she thought was too sexy or violent.