Tomorrow's post will be my overall take on the ten movies nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. Although I seldom go to the movies, and never watch the Academy Awards, I've been doing this the last couple of years. Which means I've been sitting through a bunch of movies I wouldn't necessarily see if they weren't nominated.
What's different this year is that I didn't actually see any of these movies at a theater, but watched from the comfy-cozy of my very own home.
Which got me thinking of some of the odder experiences I've had in movie theaters over the years.
One of my first movie-going experiences was seeing Disney's Cinderella at Worcester's Park Theatre. My father took me, my sister Kath, and my brother Tom, and once we'd gotten settled in, he gave us each a dime to get a drink from the flat soda machine. Kath got Tom's, no problem. Put the dime in the slot, grabbed a paper cone cup, and the Kool-aid-ish sweet drink was dispensed. She then took care of her own. Again, no
Why I didn't tell my father, as he surely would have gone out to the lobby and demanded justice in the form of a paper cone cup and some sticky-sweet orange gluck. Guess I had already embraced the motto of my time and place: oh, just suck it up.
Fast forward a couple of years. I can't remember what the movie was - no doubt something Disney - but I wasn't there with my father. I was with Kath and our friends. I believe we were in downtown Worcester at the Plymouth Theater, which was well known for the sticky cement floors they never seemed to wash. Anyway, for some reason - it was during my peak religo years - I had brought with me the "crystal" rosary beads I'd been given for my First Communion. And somehow managed to lose them. We all searched high and low under the seats, spotting discarded paper cone cups and assorted detritus, but not, alas, my rosary beads. Did I ask an usher to come look with his flashlight? Of course not. As noted above, I had already embraced the motto of my time and place: oh, just suck it up.
I didn't go to the movies all that often, but often engough. And during the remainder of my grade school years, and on through high school, college and grad school, my theater going was without incident.
And then, in 1974, I went with my sister and brother-in-law to Cambridge's Orson Welles Cinema to see a late night duo of The Harder They Come and Gimme Shelter, both of which are pretty loud and noisy. A young, hippie-ish couple had taken an infant in with them and, not surprisingly, the baby was disturbed by the noise and, no doubt, the fact that it was closing in on midnight. The baby started crying - make that screaming. And screaming. And screaming.
I thought for sure my sister Kath, who is pretty outspoken, was going to say something. I sensed her agitation and reached out to pat her arm a couple of times as we sat there hoping that the new parents would come to what few senses they had. (Seriously, who takes a baby to the midnight showing of Gimme Shelter?)
As it turned out, it wasn't Kath who blew her stack. It was me of the notoriously long fuse and placid disposition.
"Take that baby out of here!" I yelled.
The couple left in a huff, the father yelling back at me, "You care more about this fucking movie than you do about my baby."
Not quite the burn he hoped it was, as I had the perfect followup: "You obviously do."
Anyway, I got a nice ovation from the theatergoers.
Also in 1974, as a foreign movie aficionado (that is to say, snob), I went to see Lina Wertmüller's Swept Away at the now long gone Exeter Theatre (a somewhat "high culture" venue) with my friend Mary Beth. If Swept Away wasn't the worst movie I ever saw, I can't think of another one. (Okay, I can: A Walk with Love and Death which I saw in college, with Mary Beth, among others. Assaf Dayan was hot. Other than that...) We were sitting there deciding how much longer we were going to endure the show when they announced that the theater was being evacuated because of a bomb scare. This was well pre-cellphone, so it was't one of the patrons who was calling in a bomb scare. But most of us sure were hoping for it. And, miraculously, it happened! Yay! We kept our stubs as rainchecks, which we got to use at a later date. (What for, I can't remember.)
(A few years later, I was with Mary Beth when we had a fairly amusing experience when we went to see Unmarried Woman at the Cheri. The Cheri was a multiplex, and the ticket seller needed to know which movie the two elderly women in line in front of us wanted to see. Unmarried Women? she asked. The two woman gave each other a somewhat questioning look, shrugged, and one of them told the ticket seller, "Yes. We're both widows."Honestly, the ticket seller should have comped the Golden Girls the tickets.)
Movie-ing on, somewhere in the mid-late 1970's, I was with my husband watching Barbet Schroeder's documentary, Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait. We were enjoying this chilling and weirdly comic film when we heard an unmistakable noise a few rows behind us and, blessedly, a few seats over. Yes, someone had whipped it out and was peeing. We looked over and saw an exceedingly large stream of pee coursing down the floor underneath the seats. Fortunately not our seats. But we decamped to a safer space in what was a nearly empty theater.
In 1981, at the Charles Cinema, my sister Trish and I were watching Mommy Dearest when a man ran into the theater. Chased by another man pointing a gun at him. Remarkably, Trish and I were the only ones in the audience who fled. I can't remember whether the police were called, but after hanging in the lobby for a few, we were assured that things were now safe, and we did end up seeing the rest of the movie. But it was all very odd.
I can't remember the theater or the movie, but somewhere in the late 80's or early 90's, I was at the movies with Trish and our friend Peter. I was sitting on the aisle and was passed the large popcorn bucket we were sharing when it literally flew away. I have no idea what happened, but my bucket-holding arm flung out and most of the popcorn ended up in the aisle. Oops! Peter and Trish gave me "what just happened?" looks, but damned if I knew. My inner poltergeist took over? Who knows.
As time went by, I went less and less to movies in person. Instead of going to the movies, we rented videos and played them at home. And now I stream, as I did with all of the Best Picture nominees.
Anyway, nothing else all that memorable has happened in a movie theater. No bomb scares. No screaming babies. No bad hombres chasing each other with guns. But is it any wonder I'm just as happy to watch from the comfort of my own home, knowing that, if I want a soda, it won't be flat and I won't have to drink it out of a flimsy paper cone.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Image source: Amazon
No comments:
Post a Comment