It’s almost Halloween; it’s scary movie season. Recently I was asked to name the scariest movie that I’d ever seen. The answer was a no-brainer. It was the first movie I ever saw, at age five, and it still haunts me: The Wizard Of Oz.

Now, some of you may think that, on the scare-o-meter, TWOO is not in a league with, say, Saw 3 or Psycho, or that one about the hairy strangler with bad teeth. But I beg to differ. I mean, first, there’s the traumatizing dognapping scene, followed by that house-spinning tornado, which, if you lived in the Midwest as I did, triggered pants-wetting fears of natural disaster, like earthquake movies do in L.A..

Then, as you know, upon her arrival in the merry old land, Dorothy is threatened by horrors too numerous to list here, but, suffice it to say, lions and tigers and bears are the least of her problems. (High on my personal list of scariest beings—just above Glenn Beck—are those damn flying monkeys.) There’s no place like home? Ya think?

So if you’re looking for a good cinematic scare, forget The Chainsaw Massacre or Suspiria or Meet President Palin. For a real fright night, take a re-look at TWOO my friends. It took weeks for my nails to grow back after that one.

P.S. Leave a comment:  What’s the scariest movie YOU’VE ever seen?

I just don’t get why Sarah Palin is taking so much heat for writing those notes on her hand before that tea party convention. As an avid palm writer myself, I totally get where she’s coming from. I mean, after the age of fifty, who can remember anything without a little support?

I find it very useful in family discussions to have a few notes handy (if you’ll pardon the excellent pun). Like, the other night, when Tom discovered the Manolo shoebox and we had a lively debate about whether a woman really needs to own five different styles of black pumps, I was really glad I’d jotted down a few talking points on my hand before things heated up.

When my daughter brought home the Honda with a very impressive scrape across two doors, I was pleased that, in the resulting exchange between us, I’d had the foresight to jot down some notes on the cost of scrape revision and the wisdom of driving carefully. I felt I was able to put a sizeable dent (haha!) in her defense (“the stupid post just appeared out of nowhere!”), and I felt good about that even after I paid the $1800.

I also use palm jots as a handy reminder system when I am multi-tasking at home. If I leave my office to go to the bedroom, say, to get my headscratcher, I make a note on my palm as to why I am going to the bedroom, otherwise, when I arrive there, I will often have forgotten what my mission was and I will have to return to my office and wait until that information resurfaces. Or if I make a phone call, I will write down the name of the person I’m calling before I dial, so when they answer, I will not have forgotten and need to ask them who they are.

Palm writing of course, is not always reliable. Knowing I would otherwise forget it, I wrote a recipe on my hand that I found in a magazine at the dentist’s office. The office has an intimidating sign up, forbidding the ripping of pages from magazines, but I had no scratch paper and I was desperate for an easy dessert recipe. I went home and, forgetting the precious information I had on my hand, washed my hair, thereby obliterating it. (The recipe, not the hair.) So, while it’s a great tool for remembering what you don’t want to forget, you can’t forget that you are trying to remember something, or else you’ll wash your hair and screw everything up.

Anyway, like I said, after fifty, most people are memory-challenged, so, I say go with palm-writing or any other tools that help, even if you are Sarah Palin, trying to remember to call Obama “a charismatic guy with a tele-prompter…..Oh, hey, wait a minute, I just read the notes on my hand: Sarah Palin is only 46! So what’s her excuse?

P.S. for that recipe to that easy dessert I made (flourless chocolate cake), click here.