My mother had a poster of Tom Selleck in her closet. She was in her late 30's to early 40's at the time. Selleck was holding a volleyball in one hand, with his opposite elbow draped over a net, with some stamp mentioning the 1984 United States Olympic men's volleyball team, who happened to win the gold medal that year. Selleck was not on the team, in part due to the fact he was at the peak of his Magnum P.I. acting fame (even though he's 6'4" but played basketball/baseball at Southern Cal. I had to look ). My mother loved watching that show. She would have never admit to it, but I'm sure she had a big crush on him. Not many grownup parents have posters of other grownups, who are not their spouse, in the closet one shared with said spouse. She also had some old Star Wars posters in there, to maybe balance the mood whenever she went in there to pick out some work attire in the weekday mornings.
She had her other shows, too. Murder She Wrote was one. The Golden Girls, Empty Nest, Designing Women, Night Court, Dynasty. The "TGIF" lineup which I think was just to appease my sister and I. Her love of science fiction was evident with her affinity toward some of the original Star Wars films - the ones they refer to now as the "Original Trilogy" - the original in 1977, The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, and Return of the Jedi in 1983. Star Trek seemed to be her first sci-fi love, with the original Star Trek starring William Shatner that came out in the late 1960's, later followed by The Next Generation with Patrick Stewart, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, which all ran from the late 1980's to early 2000's. We saw a few of the original Star Trek films (like Wrath of Khan, Search for Spock) in movie theaters once my sis and I were old enough to understand what the hell was going on - or maybe mom didn't care if we understood or not. It was for her entertainment, not ours. And maybe her sister as well, my aunt, as she often tagged along weekends.
For the longest time, my mother had a collection of old Earle Stanley Gardner Perry Mason mysteries. These were little paperbacks with yellow-colored page edges, lined up on a bookshelf in the living room. While the original television series was well before my time, we watched some of the made for TV movies starring Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale, reprising their roles from the series that ran in the 1960's.
In her later years, she read and watched some of the Harry Potter novels and films, along with other mystery/suspense novels from the likes of Grisham, Coben, Koontz, Higgins Clark and Cornwell. At my parent's new place, there was really no room for a bookshelf, so whenever she went out with her sister come their typical Saturday shopping jaunts, any books she would buy, then eventually pour through and finish, she would later just donate to a library rather than keep it.
In this, a year since her passing, I've been thinking about my mother's love of mystery and fiction. How sifting through mountains of paperwork she kept such meticulous order of, stored in a filing cabinet "in case something happens." As if this were her own little mystery novel, her own work of art. The clues leading up to this were careful and calculated - so much so maybe even my father, her partner of fifty years, was left unaware of - leaving us all mostly in the dark. For the past year, I've been doing my best to piece together the clues and plot lines I was practically unaware of upon opening her book. And just when I think I might be approaching the final chapter, in comes another plot twist. She calculated it all along, like a staged celebrity poster, like a suspenseful riddle.