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By MICHAEL SCHUMAN / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
CLEVELAND, Ohio – The lamp in the shape of a woman’s leg, or gam (to stay within 1940s lingo), is tackier than the pinkest of pink flamingos. It stands where it should: in the living-room window. Across the room from the Parker family Christmas tree is a partially unwrapped Red Ryder BB gun.

The scene captures the flavor and time of the holiday-season movie classic A Christmas Story , Jean Shepherd’s autobiographical tale of 10-year-old Ralphie Parker, his quest for a BB gun for Christmas and the adventures that transpired around him and his little world.

The living room, the lamp, the tree, the BB gun and more are inside A Christmas Story House and Museum in the Pembroke section of Cleveland. It’s the actual house used for exteriors in the movie, made in 1983.

Who can forget the scenes where Ralphie’s father, a.k.a. “the old man,” chased the neighbor’s mutts as he entered his home? That scene was shot here. Remember Black Bart and his gang climbing the backyard fence in Ralphie’s fantasy sequence? That was filmed in the backyard. Ralphie’s kid brother, Randy, falling in the snow while escaping neighborhood punks? That happened on this street, West 11th Street in the real world, as opposed to the reel world.

Forget the fact that the interior scenes were filmed in and around Toronto. The movie producers wanted to replicate Shepherd’s boyhood steel-town neighborhood of Hammond, Ind. They found it here in Cleveland. The house’s interior is today decorated to look as much as possible like Ralphie’s home in the movie, right down to the school composition book next to his familiar glasses on the desk in his bedroom. You see the page where he printed in crude letters, “What I want for Christmas is a Red Ryder BB gun with a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time. I think everybody should have a Red Ryder BB gun.”

To which his teacher wrote the same admonition his parents gave him: “You’ll shoot your eye out,” and gave him a C-plus for his efforts.

Michael Schuman is a writer in New Hampshire.

When you go Details

The house is at 3159 W. 11th St. It’s open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Holiday hours are longer. House-museum tickets are $8 for adults; $7, seniors; $6, ages 7-12; free, 6 and younger. Tours run every half hour starting at 10:15 a.m. (12:15 p.m. Sunday). The museum and gift shop are across the street from the house.