Episodes from a Wayne Childhood, Pt. 4

MOVIES BEFORE TV

The Anthony Wayne Theater, our single movie theater, was ornately Victorian, with an overhanging marquee outside and a castle‑like facade.  The three‑sided ticket booth, with a circle to speak through and a loop to get your tickets, was out front under the shelter of the marquee.       

            Black people sat in side seats from the left aisle, down the sloping floor (each row of seats had a dim light shining at the end, and usually an usher with a flashlight would show you down where you wanted, or where there were vacancies), and whites sat in the center and to the right, as well as in the balcony upstairs.  Capacity, including the balcony, was five or six hundred, and for good movies, the house each showing was regularly sold out.        

            Initially, I went with my older sister Judy or with Mom. There were  Saturday matinees, with serials before the feature, like “The Lone Ranger,” “Flash Gordon,” “The Green Hornet” (I had also listened to radio versions of all these and others, including “The FBI In Peace and War,” “Gunsmoke,” “The Shadow,” “Captain Midnight,” and “Dr. Christian” with Lew Ayres).   In addition to the serials, and more important, to my taste, would be two or three cartoons.         

             Overhead, in the ceiling, was an ominous, ornate oval, like a huge broach, or, I imagined, a spider, with light bulbs in and around its design.  We preferred not to sit under any portion of this, and whether Judy was only joking about the danger, I seriously dreaded, well into my teens, its sudden falling.  I sat in the back rows and tried to figure precisely where it would fall, how many people would be hurt or killed.  And just before the movie began, its lights would dim to a minimal glow, but still keep on enough so you could see its dark bulk and outline.  Also there were light fixtures in a series of Roman alcoves down the walls, with murals of Anthony Wayne and Revolutionary War scenes, and these, too, would dim.        

             Up front, from speakers flanking the shallow stage, with its gaudy proscenium and folds of pink velvet curtain, the Blue Danube Waltz would be played.  The main curtain would part, then a transparent curtain, mauve‑colored, would stay and the picture come on, its beam spreading through the dark and picking up curling cigarette smoke or dust all the way from the projection booth, high up and behind us; it would be accompanied by its own music; and the transparent curtain would part and there would be the real screen and movie.       

            By age nine, I was going alone there for Saturday matinees with Kit, John, or other friends, a parent dropping us off and picking us up.  Then at ten, in fifth grade, Kit and I went on double dates to the matinee with Barby Spillman and Sue Epps.  We had started social dancing at Mrs. Hill's School of Dance, which met on Saturdays in the Saturday Club.  This was extracurricular, but most of the kids, excluding the poor and the black kids, attended.  Sue Epps had a lunch party at her house another time, when as my rival for Barby Kit Wilkes had won out, and Sue herself had decided that she liked me.  They set up a fixed game of spin‑the‑bottle (a kind of ultimate dare then), where, with only four players, you sat across from your intended kissee, which in Barby's case was Kit, not me.  When the bottle spun off center, I tried to claim a kiss from Barby, but she refused, so I was forced to kiss Sue on the cheek several times.  Our sexual progress, then, was from close dancing, to cheek to cheek, to head on shoulder (which could make my heart race), or at the movies, the slow, insinuating attempt to put my arm on the back of Barby's seat, and all the degrees from there to letting it drop so I touched her shoulder, to having her actually rest her head on my shoulder.  Kisses were cheek kisses, when and if.  At some point we started going on double dates to the movies or to dances at night, always with Mom acting as taxi for me, or my brother Chuck; on the trip back to the girl's home, they would wait in the idling car while I walked my date to her door.

             Besides any number of Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and Hopalong Cassidys (which had melodramatic simplicity and vividness, loud, brassy music surging on the soundtracks, guns that barked rather than went bang, and a richochet sound, something like pschewww!), the features included "Friendly Persuasion" (with a date), "The Red Shoes" (alone with Mom, who would sometimes take me to special grown‑up movies), "Raintree County" (with Judy), "Wee Geordie" (with Mom), and then the Disney films: "Snow White," "Pinocchio," "Fantasia," "Song of the South."  As the 3‑D craze came in, I saw "King Solomon's Mines" and "Carousel," wearing special glasses.  "Beloved Infidel," which I saw with Mom, impressed me, as it showed F. Scott Fitzgerald (not having read anything by him, I only saw him as a Writer), struggling to finish a novel and hanging different chapters up on the wall.  I also liked the romantic part, where the Shiela Graham character reads a chapter and says huskily, "It's us."  I am shocked now and then to recognize late night on television something that I remember seeing in The Anthony Wayne, on a big screen, in the midst of three hundred faceless neighbors in the dark.           

*

Was anyone else ever frightened of that overhead lighting fixture, or was it just my projection of white guilt about the segregated seating?