from dusk till dawn: The Robert Rodriguez tattoo

Now as a child I often had to cover my eyes during movies. Mom was way over protective and always had me cover my eyes. Take a movie like"jaws" for example...
girl is swimming
"cover your eyes!"
blackness while someone yelled...
see personally I find that to be more frightening.
one night when I was a kid they were showing a Friday the 13th marathon my mom told me "if I watched it the devil would come"...
now the first horror movie I saw sans eye covering was "Carrie" freaked the hell out of me.
years later my mothers sensibility grew and she stopped being prudish about flicks...but that took a long bit. Now something magical happened at around 17...i discovered exploitation cinema. I would visit my local video store and devour whatever they had in their horror movie section. My friends and I would watch an insane amount of cinema.
It was around that time that I was introduced to "from dusk till dawn."
Now not having seen it my friends ragged on me and went on and on about style. When I did see it I found a throwback to the horror movies I rented cheap viseralness not exactly trauma studios but not a major Hollywood flick.
when "grindhouse" came out I got tickets for some of my friends to go see it (had to get tickets days in advance..the ticket girl looked at me oddly for that request). I didn't go to that showing (mental issues that night). Days passed and everyone I knew went on and on about how great it was. My mom finally told me she had gone to see it with her boyfriend
"and after the first movie all these people got up to leave and said it was an awesome movie and I kept telling them there's more! There's more!"
Double features appear to be lost on the new generation, having been born in 80 I caught the tail end of that whole first run / secondary run double bill. Eventually the idea was lost due to any of a number of factors (VHS?).
I eventually saw "grindhouse" with my bud squared at the Manns Chinese. Fell in love. A bit went by and slowly I realized machete movie was being developed. Then it happened.
I got tickets to the premiere.
it was fairly easy. All I did was sign up online. Now the premier was held at the "Orpheum" theater. It's a theater I went to a few times in my early twenties for an event called "spooctacular" they had marathon viewings of horror movies, I remember seeing "the omen", "Carrie" even barbarella there.. Which was amazing since it's a historic big downtown LA theater.
08/24/10
 I was sitting in a line in the back of the theater waiting for stolzman when suddenly people were running towards a part of the fence down from me. Robert Rodriguez was signing stuff for people through a fence. So I went up and asked him to sign my arm.

the premier was amazing. There was a caravan of lowriders and stolzman and I walked behind the red carpet in our line. Sophia Vergara joined us at one point stating she "wanted to get away from the paparazzi. We sat next to some guy from "Romi and Michelle 's high school reunion" (Ramon) and at one point cheech had a conversation with someone next to us.
 The most significant part of that night was me talking to someone I was interested in, who is no longer with us. But that night he was as excited for me as I was.
years later i saw Robert Rodriguez again with Quentin Tarantino i showed him my tattoo and they both thought it was pretty awesome.