The Double Feature: A Movie and a Memory

Unlike Jan E. Morris (“Twister: Give the Actors Credit,” Calendar, May 27), I lived through a tornado that destroyed our home in the boot-heel of Missouri back in the ‘50--with me and my family inside. I went to view “Twister” to see if Jan de Bont and his special-effects crew got it right. They did. Almost.

Debris: No problem there.

The sound: My most vivid memory is the noise of that tornado as it ripped the house apart. Ever fly out of an airport with no jetways? Ontario, for example. Take the sound of a jet engine and combine it with a freight train. Now imagine it right over your head. I made sure I went to a theater to see “Twister” with digital sound. Yep, pretty close to the real thing.

Lightning and color of the sky: I also remember the constant, intense lightning, my father pacing the house to peer out the windows at the hellishly green, boiling sky. Normally, with weather like that we’d have been in the storm cellar, only my baby sister was sick and my mom refused to take her out in the rain. That part in the movie was good, too.

Rain: The one inaccuracy--at least from my experience--was that it didn’t rain enough. Of course, I understand why the crew and the cast didn’t want to be drenched all the time. And, maybe it’s different in Oklahoma. But, let me tell you, it poured during that night I was in the tornado.

Another vivid memory is getting out of our shattered house and running, barefoot (because I’d lost my shoes), across rain-slicked, nail-spiked boards to get to the storm cellar, where we sat in darkness and listened to another twister roar overhead and take out what was left of the farm buildings.

Like Morris I enjoyed the story of the people who look into the eye of the dragon. But to me, the storm was the story, the movie something to be experienced, almost like the real thing. And, by the way, maybe I’d feel differently if I’d lived in Northridge during the quake, but I’ll take the occasional shaker out here any day to the terror of those devil winds that terrorized my childhood.

MAXINE O’CALLAGHAN

Mission Viejo