I grew up in a town where there was not much to do on a Saturday. If you were lucky, one of your parents would drop you off in the morning at the Bristol Theatre, where for ninety-nine cents you could spend all day in the bygone grandeur of an RKO-Stanley-Warner Enterprises movie house, because the feature would be repeated for several showings and, surprisingly, no one ever checked to make sure that you got up and left after the first one.
We didn’t seem to have the concept of carpooling. (Gas was twenty-nine cents a gallon at the Citgo on Route 6.) We just met up with the other neighbourhood kids on the sidewalk outside the theatre entrance. I would arrive with a big paper bag of popcorn stuffed under my jacket and stand in line with my dollar bill.
The ticket counter was manned by Mrs. Plumb. She was a grey-haired, ornery woman with no patience for the queue of screeching, squirming, young children who were eager to watch 101 Dalmatians, Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music. She barked at us to keep quiet, stand still and quit jingling the change in our pockets. Everything about us annoyed her.
Once I’d survived Mrs. Plumb and had my ticket in hand, I’d hit the concession counter for Raisinets and Jujubes. Then I’d head for the door to the theatre proper, where our tickets would be torn in half by Leonard, the usher. It was Leonard’s job to slink down the dark aisles during the movie and point the beam of his heavy, black flashlight into our eyes to make sure we weren’t talking, laughing, eating smuggled popcorn or chewing bubble gum that we would stick under the fading velvet seats the first chance we got. In other words, it was his job to see to it that we did not enjoy ourselves or the movie. Mrs. Plumb, with her ugly demeanor and Leonard, with his red bellhop uniform, were just like the Wicked Witch of the West and one of her horrid flying monkeys, except I was pretty sure that Leonard couldn’t fly.
If you were caught doing something against the theatre rules, you ran the risk of being evicted by the Wicked Witch and her evil chimp. The two would literally drag the offender off by the elbows, out the emergency exit to the right of the silver screen and dump him or her into the alley behind the theatre. We witnessed this happen on more than one occasion. Sometimes there was considerable screaming and yelling involved, but the movie always kept on rolling.
Even though I was guilty of possessing contraband popcorn, I otherwise behaved myself. It would have been horrifying to be tossed from the theatre on my ear—mostly because I had no idea how to get home and would be forced to wait outside until my father, in his ‘56 two-tone green Chevy Bel Air, came to get me at 5 o’clock. Plus, I’d have to pretend that I’d watched some dumb Disney movie three times in a row.
I usually sat up front and centre. The Saturday show always began with a Warner Brothers cartoon: Bugs Bunny, The Roadrunner, Porky Pig. Then we’d settle deep into our seats for the full-length spectacular. Most often things would run smoothly, but every once in a while, with a thrrrrrrp, the film would snap and the movie would come to an abrupt halt. The lights would come up and we’d wiggle around restlessly while the unseen projectionist struggled to weave together the splintered frames of celluloid. Whole scenes from the story could be lost this way, but somehow no one seemed to care.
Although Cruella De Vil of 101 Dalmatians terrified me, I don’t think I suffered any lasting trauma from the movies I sat through during those formative years. And even though I loved Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, I didn’t dream of travelling to London or the Alps. There was really only one film from those days that sparked something real within me. It was an insipid piece of cinema called The Parent Trap. The plot revolved around identical twins (both played by Hayley Mills), separated at birth. One is raised by her mother (played by the lovely Maureen O’Hara) in Boston and the other by her father (played by the dreamy Brian Keith) in Carmel Valley.
In the movie, the California twin has her own horse and lives in a beautiful Spanish-style hacienda. I had never seen architecture like this before. In our town, if you lived in the north or south sections it was probably in an old, two-family structure with a front porch on the first story and a little balcony in the back on the second. My parents had each been brought up in houses like that, my mother on the north side and my father on the south. Doctors and lawyers and captains of industry lived on the east side in imposing Tudor manors. To the west were the cemeteries and woods and farmland. By the time I was born, my father had been promoted out of the brass mill into a desk job with his own office, so he was able to build us a new white clapboard house in the rapidly expanding residential sprawl of the northeast subdivision.
Horses had always called to me and something about that hacienda did, too. It seemed the very air must be different where that house stood. But it never occurred to my six or seven or eight-year-old mind that anything in a movie could be an actual building or geographical location. My life was still defined by the indelible confines of the place into which I’d been born. Where I came from, you didn’t stray too far from the parameters of your neighbourhood, much less the city limits. I had no sense of direction. How could I, coming from a town where East Road was south of South Street?
I had no intention to move West, past the cemeteries and the Appalachians and the Heartland to the other edge of the continent. But when I finished college, it was time to point myself in some direction. I was a Yankee misfit in the South, where I had just completed my degree. New York and Boston did not beckon me. I merely accepted an invitation to fly to a place called Monterey. With my one trunk of luggage, I brought along the life lessons I had grasped so far—tiny bits of history and fantasy, fact and fiction that I’d gleaned, less from the motion pictures than from the Theatre itself:
That you never knew who would wind up sitting next to you. That it was a nice thing to share because your neighbour might not have a quarter for a box of Junior Mints. That Raisinets and Jujubes got wedged in your teeth and did not pair particularly well. That it was just plain good manners to sit still and be quiet because other people were trying to watch, too. That if you managed to follow most of the rules, you could probably stay all day. That if you spilled your 7 Up one week and came back the next time and sat in the same seat, the sticky spot on the floor would most likely still be there. (And the wad of Bazooka under the seat would be, too.) That some things looked more glamorous in a dim light. That no matter what, the show would go on. That when all was said and done, love usually won out. That your mother’s popcorn tasted way better than the greasy cardboard stuff they sold at the concession.
With this provincial but profound set of knowledge, I landed on the central coast of California on a chilly January afternoon one month after my official graduation. Here, the 35 millimetre images spliced into my memories by an otherwise forgettable movie, were mirrored in a new—yet not so new—landscape. The air and the light in the West were different, yet familiar. And there was lots of billowy grass and cerulean sky and beaches—and horses. Maybe you really could jump into a chalk drawing like the characters in Mary Poppins.
I would discover that the hacienda was a real house. And I would become friends with people who had grown up in this place and bought their candy at the Hansel and Gretel in downtown Carmel and ridden their ponies through the rolling green ranches of the Carmel Valley and along the bed of the river down to the blue ocean and stayed out all day long, just as we had all those Saturdays ago at the Bristol Theatre.
My thanks to Gerald DeLuca for this vintage photograph of the Bristol Theatre.