Whaddya know, no news.... So why not go to the cinema?

Nice to know nothing is happening in the world, it's comforting.... everyone going on about their business and their lives, and feeling lazy after the last horridays, and ramping up for the next ones. NEW YEAR. This is always the point where I say, 'oh, just GIVE me a BREAK, hey.'

Cinemas were about a fourth of my working life. Odd to partition it off like that. I got into that branch JUST when the self-censorship code fell, so it was exciting. Put a bunch of teens together, and practically every week a new tabu was broken, well.... heady times. Things never spoken of before, and parents never really having told their kids everything about human relationships and sexuality, we had a clique that were stunned, and amazed.

And we'd be shocked, I tell you SHOCKED at what the newest films would be. And get so wound up, we'd end up bonding, and talking up a blue streak.

We had three cinemas and a drive-in in town. I would get shunted to wherever there was the most business, do traffic control, (some people won't believe this, but there could be block-long lines of people wanting to get in...) and it was fun.

The flagship was a former palace. Seated 1400 people. Art Deco. It was gorgeous. When attendance went south, they renovated, tore out the last six rows downstairs to make a projection booth, ran a floor tilted upward from the balcony and walled it up, and voilà, it was a piggy-back cinema without destroying anything historic.

And we all knew most of the secrets of the 'mother-ship' and its' architectural wonders from the 30's. Like air-conditioning in 1933. In the main auditorium, there were holes under the rows of seats... with drains. And ice men would shove blocks in them, and there was a room in a shed out back and downstairs with the most awesome turbines, and if you turned them on.... there were two rooms off the sides, with the largest propellers I have ever seen. And you'd turn them on, they would blow air across the vent systems, which would blow it over the ice, and whaddaya know.... air conditioning! In my day, they used Freon gas, and having to go down there and turn them on was my fright of the day. Those turbines would rattle, the pipes would shake, and I would turn the fans on, and run like hell. It was like being in a submarine, and the machines never felt safe. I woke up one morning, and saw smoke coming over there from my window, and was SURE they had blown up. But the hardware store behind it burned down, not the turbines.

There was a creepy one, The Strand. We all thought it was haunted. NO ONE ever wanted to go to the cellar, because the sewers were nearby, it was very 'old' for American standards... and there were bisam rats down there. Eeeew. Three stellar things from that one.... standing on the stage being early. It had been a variety theater, and some of the lighting worked. And it was fun to imagine being a performer, throwing on some lights, and just singing something out, imagining there was an audience out there and wondering if you could get the projection to reach the balcony. YES, silly. If you're seventeen and get caught up in that, you have silly dreams. It's a wonder I didn't electocute myself, throwing the switches. But I had my moment on stage. So to speak. (Which is why I like Glee.)

The other two stellar things were us kids being kids, and a catastrophe. The first: we were showing 'The St. Valentine's Day Massacre'. And some of the ushers were so taken with it, when the massacre part came on, they marched down the center aisle with guitar cases and gangsta hats, opened the cases at the exact right moment, pulled out rubber toilet plungers, and yelled 'ähähähähäh!' just as the real gangsters died in the film. Outrageous, funny, and we had a fairly large audience, and they applauded. They thought it was great. The kids bowed, and marched back to the lobby, and I wanted to kill them, but was laughing too hard. I don't know how we never got fired.

The third stellar was having a horror film, and there was a storm, and a piece of the ceiling fell in, fortunately not hurting anyone, and bats buzzed the audience. You can't get more REAL than that.

So yes, the Strand was very creepy. And High School kids who were really into working there were caught up in the whole show-biz thing in their own ways, were unpredictable, but very creative, and never did anything destructive. Just made some fun.

The King was my comfort zone. Tiny, stadium seating, tiny lobby, tiny office, it was our cocoon. And we would land there after hours, and discuss forever, they had the films which really got us into overdrive. Bonding, telling our stories, and reactions to controversial things in a tiny space, it was beautiful. Of course, as it was the late Sixties, I would come home at two a.m., my head full of new ideas, and other views, and my Mom was off the charts....

She thought I was out doing drugs. It wouldn't have occurred to me. The cinemas were drug enough.

The drive-in was having to get exiled to Hell for me. I'd be so angry about it. I only have one funny story to tell... because mostly they showed soft porn films in the Spring and the Fall, and they bored me. But I helped a German guy with a job in the refreshment stand, and had to do the ticket booth for a few weeks, and he had just started. He was there to learn English. And they were still on the soft porn phase, and there was a speaker in there, and he was listening.

And I walked in with the night's take, and he said, 'What does that MEAN, "you fucking honky bastard" ????' It had been a long day, and I said, 'Put on some more fries, and leave me alone. You'll figure it out, am sure.'

Tja.... aspirations, hopes, fun things that end up molding your world view, friendships come and gone, being so young and creative, and hopeful....

Practically living in a chain of cinemas can make you have a very different slant on the world. I don't think about it often. But it was very nice, and it's an end-of-the-year sort of smiling, and missing that sort of wonder at what all the world is about.

Oh yes, the post-scriptum. I returned there over a decade ago. The drive-in is now an industrial park. No hurt there. The Strand burned down, and only the portal was left as a reminder. The King was still standing, but.... it was an outlet for junk clothes, although it 'might' be a cinema.... And the mother ship? Was razed. The bank next door bought it, and it is a parking lot. Somewhere beneath the tarmac is a cellar toward what used to be the front of the building. A little room, where we would re-do the paint on the marquee letters, and my name is on the wall. I used to think some archeologist would dig it up some day, and ask themselves, 'Who the hell was he?'

Some people ask why I don't go there.... I did. And it was gone forever.