twilight zone/ray bradbury/ crossdressing

[Absaroka]

My family and I brought in the New Year by watching the Twilight Zone Marathon. What a bunch of old fogeys but that's another topic......

One of the episodes was called "All The Time In The World" and has been told by a number of different authors in a number of other settings. A man discovers that everyone else is gone. In this telling he loves to read. He goes to the library, overjoyed that he has all the time he wants to read now. Then he breaks his glasses.

Ray Bradbury told it another way in The Thousand Year Picnic, and did another variation in The Martian Chronicles. Arthur Clarke told it with a story about glaciers. And then there was On The Beach which was a different story but it's description of visiting an uninhabited North America had some of the same effect.

Anyway the theme in all these stories is one person (or a few people sometimes) alone, everyone else is gone. And so they can do whatever they want. And so they hole up with books or eat chocolate all the time or travel the country by railroad handcar.

Whenever I read these stories as a child I would think of going into all my neighbors houses and trying on all the womens clothing. Or just running around in a dress all the time. Which lets face it, is a bit wierd. I mean On The Beach is about humanities extinction in a nuclear war and I am seeing this as an opportunity to rummage through my neighbors lingerie before I die?

I guess we could get all analytical about for many of us at one time CDing was an isolating experience. And I think the idea of what would you do if you were alone in the world is probably one of those universal themes, if for no reason than that we are by nature social creatures, descended from gregarious monkeys rather than solitary grizzly bears.

But anyway my question is this. Who else here read stories like this or saw them on tv and had the same reaction?

Don't be shy. I'm sure a lot of people here had the same feeling.

Absaroka

[Arianne]

I may have not seen the same episodes, but I have thought the same way more than once.

[Sylvia H]

Absolutely. I remember thinking the very same thing after watching that episode (yes , before it was a rerun)

xoxo
Sylvia

[JoAnnDallas]

I plan to see the new Will Smith movie where he is the last person on the planet after a global biological pandemic. It is in the same theme.

[CJ]

Hi all,

You nailed it, Absaroka: I had exactly the same reactions when seeing this episode of Twilight Zone (or the film The Quiet Earth, in which the main character even puts on a woman's slip at some point).

I think it says something about the strength of transgender or crossdressing desires and impulses that we're willing (as children, anyway) to rate the disappearance of the entire human race as a secondary event.

Love,
CJ

[Ms. Jill]

I have seen that Twilight Zone episode, also read similar stories and had similar fantasies but I think my greatest fantasy happened in my early teens. When I started as a freshman in high school, I followed a tradition started by by three older sisters, and attended a parochial high school no the eastern edge of downtown in my city (big mistake). I had to ride two city busses to get there and the transfer point happened to be in front of a major downtown department store. After school while waiting for my homebound bus, I would sometimes browse the lingerie department in the store. My fantasy was that I would be locked in the store at closing time and would have to spend the night there. While I was locked in the store I would try on everything in the lingerie dept. then the ladies dept. then shoes etc. My fantasy would end with a security guard waking me up dressed completely en femme after having run of the store all night.

The store is still there and the bus stop has been upgraded but every time I drive past I can recall that fantasy, and how good it made me feel.

Luv and Hugs Jill