September 24, 2004

• This is great. Thanks, Restless. I really wish I'd been alive during this era of moviegoing. Newsreels, cartoons, double-features, all of it. Theaters with balconies and plush seats. It's not the same going to the "Rave" multiplex, fighting hundreds of people to get in, only to be assaulted by seizure-inducing lights and noise.
• It's interesting now to think about times when local movie houses, complete with cartoons and news reels, were such an expanding experience. I'm not old enough to descibe going to the movies before the 60s, and my own local theater was in the US, but I'm reminded of the Saturday matinee in the (then) small town I grew up in. Every week my dad would drop me and and my sister off at noon and we'd line up with hundreds of other kids to pay our fifty cents for a double feature. I'm not sure how they selected the films as they were an odd mix of current and old (The SOund of Music and Ben Hur one week, 2001: A Space Odyssey billed with Fantastic Voyage the next). I will never forget, at age 9, sobbing my way through Melanie's death scene in Gone With the Wind... only to hear a cynical teenager behind me comment wearily, "Christ, they're dropping like flies." I was both outraged (how could he?!) and interested (wait... what's he talking about?). When I saw the film again years later I understood. At any rate, all those movies were a terrific escape for us and our parents too (Mom and Dad, we know what you were doing while we were out of the house, okay?). I'd love to read about other childhood movie-going experiences. Um, so... maybe I should have introduced myself before asking for story swaps and commenting all over the place over the last few days... Hello. I'm new here.
• Hi, Idest. Welcome. Have a banana. Good on you for jumping into the pool and getting wet. Just use the peel to dry off with--it's what we all do.
• They really were palaces. Check out the Egyptian Theater in Boise, Idaho (and here). It was renamed the Ada at one point, fell into neglect, and then the name changed back to the Egyptian after the (glorious) restoration. One of the good things the town has done. A FANTASTIC place. What character.
• We-e-ell now, when I was a young 'un, we first had to go fetch a cow, one with a good broad side and not too many markings, and stand 'er out in a part of the field where there weren't too many cowpats. Then a few of us would lug the steam generator out and fire up the projector (or "Old Sparky" as we called it), and Sam the Movie Man would hold the first reel up and start spooling it in front of the beam, and we'd all sit in the grass and watch. 'Course, every now and then the cow would wander off and we'd have to chase 'er down, and then there were the reel changes, but we'd pass the jug around and discuss what was likely to happen, and you know what? As often as not, we were right, dadgummit. You kids these days with your "theaters" and your tellyvisions and whatnot, you don't know what you're missing. Where's the imagination? Where's the cow?
• Ah, lh, when I was a kid, before tv and video games, the movie theater was the ultimate. On the weekends, you could see 2 (maybe randomly selected) feature films, 10 cartoons, a serial or two, a newsreel, a short subject, and spend a half hour while the March of Dimes cup was passed around since polio was rampant. This was like 6 hours of watching tv, but mostly better. Many of the theaters were palatial, with idiosyncratic carpets, stairwells,leading you to the ground floor or the balcony, chandaliers which dimmed in the lobby to tell you that the program was starting. murals inside the viewing theater which might be art deco, egyptian, art moderne, or renaissance themed. A lot of fanfare which made the experience resonate. No commercials. But, it could be quire exiting when the film would catch fire. I must have seen every change of pictures for about 10 years during my childhood/early adolescense. I even sneaked (I prefer "snuck", but lh is in the house) into a showing of a really "shocking" movie which showed the birth of a baby - grainy black and white and beaver shots,but not all that interesting. In a lot of ways, I'd like to be able to go back to the sense of wonder that would make the hair on the back of my neck stand up when the lights went down and a really good movie would start up. The imagination was there, but the cow turned out to be too small when Cinemascope arrived. (Apologies for the spelling mistakes which I'm sure you'll find above.)
• path, I'm in my 50s, and though I didn't grow up in places with palatial theaters, I remember cartoons and serials and short subjects (and bottles of milk left on your doorstep... but I digress). Anyway, please don't apologize for spelling mistakes (if people didn't misspell, I'd be out of a job!) or try to avoid unofficial forms like "snuck," which I love -- much of what I try to do when the subject of language comes up is convince people that the way they speak is fine, and nobody has the right to tell them they're being "ungrammatical" (or, in the words of a great Robert Hall book, "Leave Your Language Alone!"). Language belongs to its users, not the snobs and rulegivers.
• Language belongs to its users, not the snobs and rulegivers. *dng applauds languagehat*
• All the prescriptivists point fingers at languagehat and go, "Na na na na na, Hat is a discriptivist."
• *sticks tongue out at prescriptivists*