Life Is Fra-gile (It's Italian)

This Christmas Eve will be a little less merry. Bob Clark, director of a Caven family favorite "A Christmas Story" was killed in a car accident on Wednesday. Bob and his twenty-two year old son Ariel were killed in a head-on crash with a vehicle that a drunken driver steered into the wrong lane. It is a tragic end to a life that brought, almost accidentally, so much joy.
"Accidentally" because there isn't a lot in Bob Clark's oeuvre that would lead us to believe that an American holiday classic would fit on a list that includes such treasures as "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things" and "Black Christmas", though one can see a thread of kids and yuletide running through his work. His other best-known film is the "peek-a-boo" classic, "Porky's". Maybe the story of a group of Florida high schoolers seeking revenge on a sleazy nightclub owner should have given us a hint of the twinkling nostalgia that would come just a year later - along with the sequel, "Porky's 2: The Next Day".
In 1983, Bob Clark made a movie based on the Jean Shepard stories found in the collection "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash". The story of Ralphie and his quest for an Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle is the story of every kid who has ever coveted anything. It also includes a loving but very real family with grumbling and cursing and sibling rivalry, and enough apocryphal moments to fill three movies: The tongue on the flagpole, The bar of Lifebouy stuck in the mouth, using your little brother for traction on the stairs, "Eat More Ovaltine", and the list goes on and on, culminating in the refrain, "You'll shoot your eye out, kid!"
More than anything else, I know that round faced kid with glasses who lived in fear of the neighborhood bully and dreamed of getting an "A plus, plus, plus" on his composition. I was that kid who got pasted in the face with one too many snowballs. I was that kid who had his Christmas dreams come true. I am that kid who still watches as much of "Twenty-four Hours of A Christmas Story" as his family and friends will let him. Bob Clark never won an Oscar, but he certainly deserves "a major award."