"Speak in the Horn!"

So, my mom got a hearing aid. This would have been helpful when I lived with my parents for a few reasons...least of which was the constant "WHAT?!?ing" I got from her and mostly because I might have been able to fall asleep with her TV on right under my bed if it had been at a slightly lower volume than ALL THE WAY UP.

Not that I'm complaining. I lived there for free.

But, you know.

Anyway, I wanted to make her laugh in case she was sad about losing her hearing, or whatever, so I spent part of yesterday googling some stuff about hearing aids and being hard of hearing (to be honest I needed something to distract me from googling and then reading about and subsequently sobbing over the Boston Marathon -- did you SEE the picture of that little boy who died and his cute little missing tooth?). I wanted to find an old cartoon I recalled from my childhood in which (I think) an old lady duck can't hear anything and so she tells the little kid ducks to "speak in the horn". And she holds up this horn to her ear. Nothing. Did I make this up? I could have sworn...

Guess what a google image search brings you when you search for "speak in the horn"?

This guy.

and:

This guy. I'm guessing he really gets the chicks.

I gave up and instead tried to YouTube search for a clip from a movie I remembered from my early teens starring Patricia Arquette who played an abused and abandoned stupid girl who was locked in a barn (it turns out she wasn't stupid at all, she just couldn't hear) and somewhere in the movie she gets a hearing aid and there's this great emotional scene in which she discovers that things make noise. Paper. Hands clapping.

But I couldn't think of the name of the movie. I emailed my friend. She was out of the office. I googled "hands make noise? paper make noise?" (the quote I remembered from the movie) Nothing.

Then I googled "Patricia Arquette deaf girl". Jackpot! The movie was called Wildflower and it was made in 1991. It also starred a young REESE WITHERSPOON as the girl who goes nosing around in barns that aren't her business and finds abandoned partially deaf girls in there and then helps them go to barn dances and get a leg up in life. I still couldn't find the clip I wanted. (The one where Wildflower first gets her hearing aid and says "hands make noise? paper make noise?") Nothing.

I did, however, find the trailer. There's a tiny bit of the scene I'm referring to at 1:31-1:33. ("I hear words!") Funny, I remember it being SUCH a good movie and here it looks kind of awful:

There is no ending to this hearing aid story, nor is there a moral. In fact they don't even call them "hearing aids" anymore, but "Hearing Instruments" (according to my mom.) My point is that some things just aren't on the internet (because you probably made them up in your head). And sometimes people bomb things and you have to try and look away for a few minutes and make fun of your mom.

But you can't. Because there's nothing wrong with being hard of hearing.

And look how cute it is:

That was a trick question. YOU CAN'T EVEN SEE IT.

"Hey mom!"

"What?"

"You have a banana in your ear."

"What?!"

"You have a BANANA in your ear."

"WHAT?!?"

"I SAID, you have A BANANA in YOUR EAR."

"WHAT?!? I CAN'T HEAR YOU. I HAVE A BANANA IN MY EAR."