Gone With A Sigh

The death of old movies is as if a moribund surrogate parent has died again. Having been raised on Saturday matinees I am mourning the threatened change at TCM in which Cooper and Cagney will fall to the cutting room floor along with Grable, Gable and Garson. In the U.K., old movies made before 1975 have already been dumped. They have been deemed bad for the bottom line. Soon AARP members will be bereft. Evidently young audiences haven’t figured out that whatever they are watching has its antecedents.

The Austin Theater in Kew Gardens could never be mistaken for a Dream Palace but the place was thick with them. It was there I got caught in the swirl of Busby Berkley or posed as a mild-mannered reporter looking for a phone booth or overthrew the order with a raised eyebrow like Groucho and climbed the stairway to heaven. There was no gravity in that floating world.

Movie-going was an event apart from the big screen. We screamed and laughed, hissed and cheered in a communal experience even as the usher hushed us as she patrolled the gum-encrusted rows.

She was dressed for the part in a red uniform like a drum majorette or doorman. With a deft turn of her flashlight, she would highlight the rowdies and those with raging hormones in the balcony the way a warden turned his searchlight on the prisoner climbing the wall with tied sheets. All she really wanted was a quiet aisle to imagine her life in that shaft of smoke from the projection booth. She would walk home on deserted streets under blinking neon, as a chorus girl, hat-check girl or the girl next door having left this world and finally stepping back into an Edward Hopper painting.

I had a near-death experience at the movies before my legs reached the floor from my seat. With eyes still wide from the sun a man inched his way along my aisle about to sit on top of me. Just as he was stooping to crush me, I rattled my Good and Plenty and barely avoided an ignominious demise.

As a kid I was movie-smart having been suckled on double features from age four in the custody of my older brother. It was there I learned that babies came from hot water and towels. I found out how to almost kiss, that most people wore tuxedos and sailors were the best dancers. I could tell the clean-cut good guy from the dirty double-crosser by his mustache alone. And I knew that second bananas married second banana-ettes. Tarzan’s words were not lost on me when he said to Jane: It’s a jungle out there.

It was at the movies where we figured out the difference between fantasy and agreed-upon reality. Left to our own devices, we learned that people were not likely to carry one roller skate and a cup of coffee in their overcoat as Harpo had honked. We entered the theater any time heedless of beginnings and ends. Yet, this is where we came in, I would say when the two fragments met as if life made sense after all even if I didn’t yet know where I fit in.