For many years, from the early 1920s to early 1970s, my mother's family owned the only movie theater for miles in a pretty rural area, the Oklahoma Panhandle. My mom and aunt had the stars kept in their eyes by a constant movie diet and the posters of their favorites taking up space in their bedrooms. While peers were helping their parents bring in cattle and tend the chickens, they were helping their own family at the concession stand and ticket booth of the theater - and of COURSE they peeked in at the movies!
I'm not sure how my family got into the movie business. My great grandmother came from a plantation in Louisiana, and her family also owned and ran a local newspaper. All I know about my great grandfather is the tidbit that he was once a Presbyterian minister in Iowa-how they segued into becoming theater owners remains a mystery to me. But they were pretty popular in the Oklahoma Panhandle, and South Kansas too! Without them there would have been no dime Saturday where the kids spent an afternoon tearing up the upholstery and taking in Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.
I have an embarrassingly funny early memory about myself: I was playing around in the aisles of the theater while a movie was showing (I'm sure I was supposed to be sitting), and I was so enchanted that those people on the big screen were talking to me - um, I replied to them loud and clear and I'm sure annoyingly to the movie-goers I even remember my mother and other family members trying to corral me as I dodged their grasps and continued to "chat it up" with my new friends, heh heh.
They finally caught me and then my memory shifts to sobbing in the ticket booth, remember those? It stuck out from the building and was its own enclosure. I think I was scared of it, although I don't know why. I even recall having a white pad of paper on which to draw while I sniveled. Memories are funny creatures. Some stick with us forever, while other moments in our lives flit away like a fluffy white cloud caught by the wind... who knows why.
The theater was sold around 1970, but my family's love for movies endured. My favorite family memories encompass movies even after we were out of "the business." My aunt would take my brother and I to all kinds of movies, sometimes in the BIG CITY of Amarillo I was awed by the huge theaters in the city, the ones with more than one film playing, even! My aunt made sure we saw almost every 007 movie with Roger Moore (she drooled over him), and we saw Barbra in every movie up to Yentl.
One of my all-time favorite movies when I was a child--believe it or not, was Sweet Charity. I didn't fully understand the plotline, mind you, but the nightclub atmoshpere, the flapper dresses, the makeup and the music all caused my mouth to drop open and my eyes to remain glued to the screen. I was six or seven years old at the time, but even then glamour-or what I saw as glamour-called to me with a Siren's Song.
I wish I'd kept that feeling and remembered it more clearly as I grew up and began to make life choices; the essence of what called to me in that movie was... The Rhythm of Life.
