When you look at the poster for "Pink Motel" (1982), then consider the fact that the film stars Phyllis Diller and Slim Pickens, you realize you have just stumbled upon the widest poster-to-stars gulf in the history of cinema.
My mother was awakened by a loud thump. As the owner and manager of a motel, she heard all sorts of peculiar noises at night, but this wasn’t in the parking lot or one of the rooms or the Sonic drive-in next door. It was in her house. She crept to our den, just off the lobby, where she saw a dark, wavering figure, standing unsteadily by the fireplace. Though the door which led outside was usually locked, on this occasion her loving but absentminded young son had forgotten to throw the dead bolt, and the door was open, so light from the motel sign outside streamed in, bathing the shadowy figure in ghostly luminance. “Get out,” my mother commanded the shape. It groaned, but voiced no words. “Go on, get out of here.” The spectral figure seemed uncertain. “You’re drunk," she insisted, "Get out, now.” The entity found his voice, and slurred, “Th-this ain’t my room?” “No, this is my house. You’re in room 107. Now git.” The confused guest belched a clumsy apology, and stumbled out. My mother slammed the door behind him and locked it, silently cursing her scatterbrained son, who, not two rooms away, drifted in ignorant slumber.
At our motel, we had a swimming pool with two life preservers. These were "for emergency use only," as a stern sign warned, but guests would take them down and engage in all manner of horseplay. If I or my mom saw it, we'd march out there with fingers a-wag. "It was for their own safety," we would tell them, my mom convincingly and I obnoxiously (I was a kid ordering people around!), and they would sadly hang the life preservers back on the wall. But in over a decade, I never once saw someone reach for a life preserver in an emergency and have it not be there because it was being enjoyed. There may be a moral here about not putting off happiness just because you're worried about something bad that may never occur, but I think a bigger lesson is this: If you give a child of nine the power to reprimand adults, he will grow up full of himself.
At Shields Date Garden, a terrific roadside stop selling dates, date shakes, date cakes, date cookies, date clothing, date butter, date internal combustion engines, and 4,000 other date-based goods and services, there is an air-conditioned theater showing free entertainment: The provocatively-titled short film, "The Romance and Sex Life of the Date." Though the subject matter -- how dates are grown and harvested -- is titillating only if you're a small seed-bearing fruit, it is interesting nonetheless. But I have to say, while the current incarnation of the film boasts slick production values, I miss the recently retired 1983 version that combined owner Floyd Shields' original slideshow and narration from the 50's with such 80's staples as big hair, star-wipes, and Casio soundtrack. All that was missing were dates in torn sweatshirts and leg warmers, but that would have made viewers too hot and bothered.
One poster screamed, "Niagara and Marilyn Monroe: The two most electrifying sights in the world!" That's truth in advertising. Niagara (1953) was Monroe's first big starring role, as a fatale of the femme-est variety who runs around on her husband as they stay at the Rainbow Cabins motel, the famous falls thundering in the background of nearly every scene. The production actually built the faux-tel on location beside the falls, and a single building from the set still stands to this day. 
