I recently let my subscription to the New Yorker lapse, and I thought I was OK with that. They sort of had a “Lucy in the chocolate factory” effect on my reading habits, and I was getting eerily good at guessing what the cartoon captions were going to be. But then a feature like this comes along, and I regret ever missing a single issue.

For the Summer Fiction issue, the magazine invited some great contemporary writers to write about “their real-life summer-movie memories,” and with writers like Charles D’Ambrosio, Miranda July, and Dave Eggers… let’s just say it’s a great series of essays. (And they’re all online here.) I haven’t made my way through all the essays yet, but so far Gary Shteyngart’s piece about seeing Cocoon in “a Russian bungalow colony in the Catskill Mountains” as a young immigrant is taking the cake.

The movie of that summer was “Cocoon.” Its premise: aliens—Antareans, to be exact—descend upon southern Florida to offer eternal life to a group of nursing-home residents. At that point in my life, Hollywood could sell me anything—from Daryl Hannah as a mermaid to Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl and Al Pacino as a rather violent Cuban émigré.

At the movie theatre, my father and I were essentially two immigrant men—one smaller than the other and not yet swaddled in a thick carpet of body hair—sitting before the canned spectacle of our new homeland, silent, attentive, enthralled.

Here was the geriatric Don Ameche break-dancing after being energized by the aliens’ fountain of youth, while back at our bungalow colony my grandmother and her fellow senior citizens mulled over the price of farmer’s cheese and reminisced about the Great Patriotic War. Here were Floridian palm trees, ocean breezes, and Tahnee Welch—daughter of Raquel—taking off her clothes while Steve Guttenberg, playing essentially himself, peeked through a peephole. I had never seen a woman as easily beautiful, as effortlessly tanned and as New World lovely, as Ms. Welch the Younger. The fact that my sexual awakening peripherally involved Steve Guttenberg I have gradually accepted.