The Parkside Movie House I loved it, especially Saturday afternoons. Usually, in summer, I sat through a stifling three hour long synagogue service, or two hours in Junior Congregation in the even hotter small sanctuary, the site of weekday prayers, then dashed home for lunch, or downstairs to the social hall if someone was offering a Kiddush, where I and my friends ate cake and stole shot glasses of whisky. Then we went to the movies. There was always a double feature, and a newsreel and cartoons and sometimes a comedy short. That is, we went from a hot three hours with incomprehensible chants in an ancient Middle Eastern language to an air-conditioned three hours with entertainment. Popcorn and vending machine candy added. The show was continuous, so if we had really enjoyed the first movie or it was particularly hot outside, we could stay and watch it again without paying. Entrance to all this was twenty-five cents, which even then was not much, not much more than the price of a pack of cigarettes. The movies we saw are not often part of university seminars on film. Westerns were very popular and we saw enough of them that we could laugh at an Indian attack because we had seen the same attack twice before in different movies. Reusing the film undoubtedly saved money and, given the inevitable outcome of such Indian attacks, may have saved some Indians. We loved pirate movies. After a pirate movie, at perhaps four thirty on a day that might stay light for three hours, we would repair to my rickety gray painted splinter wood back porch and raise some sort of skull and crossbones on it and it was a particularly nasty sort of pirate ship. It was my porch and I was good at imagining scenarios, so often I was captain. My sisters and someone else’s, I forget her name, brought us flagons of rum or cola, whichever was available. Sometimes we were at a French Foreign Legion post in the Sahara and sometimes at a British fort in Africa or India. We learned to be white males at those movies, and we loved it. We were colonialists at heart, imposing our will and sometimes whim on assorted underclasses. Of course it all affected other parts of our growing personalities; in addition to the privilege of white manhood, some of us learned elements of narrative. We became actors and even playwrights, and became skilled in scenic design. Our was not the only ship in the neighborhood. What I never did, then, was realize the great disconnection between my Saturday mornings and my Saturday afternoons. Eventually I did, I think.
Posted on: Mon, 09 Jun 2014 14:29:56 +0000
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