I've been a fan of JAWS since I was a child. I vividly remember nagging my mother to take me to see the film when it was first released in 1975. (She wisely turned down the chance to permanently scar a four-year-old, choosing instead to let the permanent scarring occur when it first aired on TV a few years later.) Somehow, I never made the mental connection between the film that had terrified me and my frequent summer trips to the Jersey Shore, until I was bumped by a shark when I was 10, and that was all she wrote for me and the ocean. I haven't been back since, and I doubt I'd even go in a lake or river at this point. (Thanks, RIVER MONSTERS, for showing me that NO body of water is safe.) Hell, if I close my eyes for too long in the shower I can almost feel the jaws of Carcharodon Carcharias closing around me....brrr.
