Film — the real thing, with sprocket holes, that runs through a projector — is becoming rare these days, but in 1976, when we ran a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, it was plentiful and thankfully not explosive. This didn’t keep the fire inspectors from fining us if fire buckets in the projection booth weren’t precisely 12 inches off the floor, a regulation that dated back to the bad old days of nitrate film. Almost all movies, certainly major motion pictures, were on a nitrate base before the late forties and certainly after 1952, when Kodak finally stopped making the volatile stuff, and switched entirely to a variation of acetate, the base they’d been using all along for home movies. In the heyday of the movie palaces, going to the movies, let alone working as a projectionist, were risky activities. Theater fires as dramatic as the one depicted in Cinema Paradiso were, before 1952, common, if not somehow likely. 

How likely? A 1936 issue of International Projectionist estimated that one American projectionist died, on average, every 18 days, probably not of a heart attack. Nitrate often simply exploded. And get this: while projectors were carbon arc (which we still had at the St. George in seventy-six), nitrate film, whose base is essentially a solid form of nitroglycerin, had all the aspects of a bomb (fire, volatile material). 

The very existence of  projection booths in theaters had been established early in the silent era, largely as a safety feature, an attempt to contain anticipated fire. Should a fire begin in the booth, the wax that lined the projection ports — if not a fuse of some sort — melted, and flame-proof shutters sealed the booth from the theater, like a tomb, which, as a matter of fact, it might become. Case in point, the June 1947 issue of the aforementioned International Projectionist eulogizes a fifteen-year-old — presumably breaking into the craft of projection — Marion Shea, who lost his life in a theater fire. 

What is it, or was it, about nitrate film stock? A US Navy instructional movie about the safe handling of celluloid/nitrate film includes footage of a full reel of the stuff burning underwater. Water, in fact, is the worst thing you can add to a nitrate fire: it only encourages dangerous gases.

Beginning in the thirties, the fact that practically the whole history of movies as an art form was laid down on unreliable stock that might explode spontaneously, meant that a number of archives were destroyed on hot summer days, in storage vaults that lacked ventilation. Everything Fox ever made before 1937 went up in an archive fire that year, requiring seven fire companies to extinguish.
A similar calamity happened to MGM’s archives in 1965.  

We hardly show movies on nitrate anymore, except in rare circumstances, which still doesn’t solve the problem of preservation of rare reels, because, over time, in the presence of the kind of heat you experience in a hot car in a parking lot in July, these films will either explode or bubble and degenerate. 

This leads me to the anecdote that started off this post. My friend, Robert Endres, now retired from his long-time job as Chief Projectionist at Radio City Music Hall, reminisced recently about his attempts to save some archival footage of the Center Theatre’s opening. The Music Hall had, in those days, vaults for the storage of nitrate film, and Bob was trying to get the fragile newsreels converted to acetate before they disintegrated altogether.

One of my great regrets was that I couldn’t save newsreel footage of the opening of the Center Theatre. There’s very little documentation about it, and I had the footage in our vault.  It was nitrate and when I opened the can I noted that it had started to bubble. Our Chief Operating Officer suggested taking it to Technicolor and having the Lab director take a look at it. I did. When I walked into his office, he closed the blinds over the inside window. He opened the can, took one look, and said, “Get it out of here!”  I said, “Can’t you do something?” and he repeated, “Get it out of here!”  I picked the can up and put it under my left arm and he said, “No, put it under your right arm. That way if it blows up it only takes a lung and not your heart.” Needless to say, I took it back to the Hall very gingerly!
 
I couldn’t resist asking  Bob what happened after that...to which he replied,

I held the can out at arm’s length most of the way back. I took the subway and I’m sure violated a number of rules of the Fire Department and the MTA in doing so, although they probably wouldn’t have known about the hazard of nitrate film by that time.

Nitrate film seems to be a perpetual hot potato. Michael Zahs’ collection of early Miele films, which he kept in a shed on his Iowa property for many years, were nitrate; this didn’t keep him from mailing a number of them to the Library of Congress, which duplicated them and mailed them back! 

You might be wondering why, if Kodak had acetate as far back as 1909, which it happily sold to amateur filmmakers, it kept producing nitrate materials to sell to the studios? The myth surrounding nitrate’s beauty, the dense blacks and luminous whites, is probably the answer. To which I say, what price beauty?
 
Afterthoughts:

Here are a few more hot potato anecdotes from Bob Endres, and one other afterthought besides;

Bob’s comments:

1. We actually had a nitrate film vault at the Hall complete with two sets of doors. My boss discovered that it wasn’t cooled in the summer and had some of the film brought down to my office in the booth. Since you’re not supposed to have more than a few thousand feet of film outside of a fireproof container at one time, this startled the city inspectors when they came to check the booth, particularly since one of the cans on top had a big red label saying “Nitrate” on it. There was quite a bit of nitrate footage stored in the nitrate vault still, when I started there. Our Head of House Operations knew about it and when he saw Towering Inferno he said we should get  it out of the building. 

2. I...didn’t want to destroy the documentary footage that we had on the history of the Hall. Since it was operated by RKO, there were a lot of RKO newsreels that contained Radio City stories.  We also had a “March of Time” episode that featured the Hall. I made a deal with MOMA [Museum of Modern Art] that they could have the footage if they would pull acetate prints for me, thus enabling me to show footage that I didn’t want to take a chance with when it was on nitrate. A stagehand and I filled a shopping cart with reels of nitrate film and wheeled it up 6thAvenue to MOMA.

3. We did a tribute to Myrna Loy at Carnegie Hall with a film retrospective. I got a call from an editor wanting to know if we would run a clip on nitrate film. When the editor said she would take the clip out of the 2000’ reel in was contained in, I said O.K.  She brought the three-minute roll to New York in her purse on a plane.

Final note: Acetate is no optimal medium either, not volatile like nitrate, but imminently perishable. Check out “vinegar syndrome.”

How do you save a movie palace that’s about to be stripped by its current tenant of its Czechoslovakian crystal chandeliers, its brocade drapes and Wurlitzer organ, the stuff that makes it a movie palace? That tenant would be Loew’s, and the stripping almost happened, back in the bad old 1970’s, when movie palaces were going down faster than you could count them. The theater was Shea’s Buffalo, an opulent four-thousand-seat Tiffany-designed house in a crumbling downtown; and the people who saved it — headed up by a young man named Curt Mangel — were the Friends of the Buffalo Theater. A lot of movie palaces weren’t so lucky; the Boyd in Philadelphia comes to mind, and the Albee in my hometown, Cincinnati. Both had “friends” organizations, but neither had anyone clever enough to do what Mr. Mangel did: sleep in a dressing room backstage, keeping watch, until the theater had finally achieved its landmark status (he fixed the elevator to the dressing rooms while he was at it). The stripping of old palace theaters is a sad business; I’ve watched it go on myself. At the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat palace I helped to run in 1976, our landlord had already sold off the theater organ to a pizza parlor in Texas, and twenty-three alabaster torchere lamps had vanished from the lobby. Fortunately, the rest of the place was intact, remaining so to this day. Shea’s remains as well, a testimony to its original “friends,” and to  the current management and staff, students from local schools and stalwart volunteers.  

Whenever I travel, I look up local theaters of interest, and two months back I had reason to be in Buffalo. While working on a post about the North Park, wonderful neighborhood house, I became aware of its more opulent sister downtown, Shea’s (these days titled Shea’s Performing Arts Center, which also includes several smaller theaters). The theater itself was created by Rapp & Rapp for local  business titan Michael Shea, who had seen the Uptown Theatre on a visit to Chicago, and wanted nothing less grand for Buffalo. At a cost of $1.9 million, Shea’s took all of 1925 to build, opening in 1926, with Adolph Menjou in King of Main Street. A (“285 special”) organ, the twin of  the Uptown’s Mighty Wurlitzer, played forth. 

But the Depression would turn out not to be any easier on Buffalo than on the rest of the United States, and Michael Shea, that big-hearted theater mogul, refused to slice and dice his payroll. He also kept acquiring theaters when he probably shouldn’t have, and then he died. Not so long after, his family sold off their interests in the theater enterprises, and his flagship, Shea’s Buffalo, fell into the hands of entrepreneur V.F. McFaul, who, with some financial assistance from Paramount, managed it and other Shea properties until Loew’s took it over in 1948. The Wurlitzer wasn’t getting much of a workout, but the theater did well enough, until its slide into the difficult 1970’s. 

The seventies; if you know just a little about single-screen movie houses, especially the palaces, you know what that decade did to theaters in downtowns everywhere. Shea’s owner at that time, Leon Sidell, wasn’t doing so well himself; he’d fallen behind in his taxes. The City of Buffalo took ownership of the palace, which might seem bad but, as it turned out,  became the theater’s get-out-of-jail-free card. The comptroller of Buffalo at that point was a friendly interest, and then there was Curt Mangel – and the  fifteen “Friends.” You’re going to hear a lot about Curt, now and in the future; he’s a sort-of Johnny Appleseed of movie palaces (and organs) — more on that sometime soon. 

Meanwhile, it’s October and I’m lucky enough to talk my way into Shea’s on my last day in town. Jennifer Orr, PR Coordinator, happens to be putting on her coat, and agrees to let me take more than a peek. She also introduces me to Doris Collins, Historic Restoration Consultant, who walks me around, then makes me feel at home in her basement office/workshop, full of swags and trimmings.
“Curt Mangel slept in this theater!” she told me, a few minutes into our chat, and I realized that no matter how many cell pix I took or stray factoids I tracked down, the story of Curt and Friends of the Buffalo is the core story of Shea’s. Not only did Curt fix the elevator to the dressing room he was sleeping in, and a lot of other things, boilers and such, he put himself on a self-imposed night-shift, cataloguing  all the furniture, chandeliers, paintings, carpets, you name it. To quote Showstopper, from the Comments column appended to the Shea’s Cinema Treasures entry, “To this day, many of the fixtures/furniture have a serial number that was put on them to inventory them, that was done in the middle of several nights without Loews knowledge, to prevent them from stripping the building.”

Cheekily, while on Loew’s payroll, Curt managed to create an inventory that would later be useful in the landmark court case Friends of the Buffalo employed to save the theater from being stripped of its decorative effects.The court case demonstrated that curtains and sconces and such were the essence of the theater itself, intrinsic to its operation, an argument that apparently has been replicated in other theater salvation lawsuits. Shea’s received its Landmark status, and Curt moved on. I was privileged to have dinner with him in Philadelphia recently, where he’s curator of the remarkable Wanamaker Organ, but that’s another story for another time.

Meanwhile, it’s enough simply to say thanks to Curt, and to the other original fourteen “friends;” not to slight a city comptroller with a heart, and the folks who have followed, the staff and management, including those who carry on the work of restoration. Case in point, 1998: Doris Collins and her crew discovered that rumors about the theater’s Tiffany design have a basis in fact. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted a Tiffany design exhibition that year, and the catalogue that accompanied it featured an original Tiffany Studio painting of the interior of Shea’s, as it had been planned. The Met couldn’t lend Shea’s the painting, but was happy to make a full-scale negative, from which Doris and her team could extract minute details. 

This brings us to the story of the three curtains. The original house curtain was a Rapp and Rapp Design (the architects). Despite the fact that Tiffany had proposed a different curtain altogether, the theater actually opened with the Rapp design, a scalloped valence, and a forty-five foot curtain that raised vertically. It lasted until the sixties, when it was replaced by a second curtain, about which little has been said, other than that 400 pounds of dust was removed in 1998. Thread-bare in places, that curtain was replaced by one woven by Backhausen & Son, in Vienna, Austria, exactly fulfilling the exquisite Tiffany design (see image above).
 
Medieval cathedrals took centuries to build, and movie palaces may take at least a half-century to restore. So it is with Shea’s PAC, where volunteers of all ages find ways to make the palace shine. In addition, Doris Collins employs local college and high school students through a unique internship program in restoration, helping them to emerge with valuable skills and knowledge.

​Then there’s the business end of Shea’s:  it’s a Broadway director’s dream if your show didn’t make back the money it spent getting mounted (70-80 percent don’t apparently). Thanks to a loyal Upstate New York following of season subscribers, certain marginally-profitable NYC productions can sell out at Shea’s if they go on the road, not to mention shows like The Lion King, Wicked, and Cats, which extend their profitability.

What makes it all work? Beyond a loyal subscribership and good management, it’s the theater, baby!  Like the afore-mentioned medieval cathedrals, there’s so much to look at in this gorgeous Tiffany-designed hall. 

Would it be a parking lot if Curt hadn’t slept there? If management hadn’t guided it skillfully into a successful live venue? Or if someone, perhaps a volunteer, hadn’t labored to restore those Tiffany-designed roses and kumquats that frame the proscenium?
 
Afterthoughts: 
1. The previously-mentioned New York Times article about Shea’s playbill successes mentions that “squatters” saved the theater in the seventies. Isn’t there a more dignified way to describe what the Friends did?

2. Ever wonder what the difference is between real marble and scagliola?  Ever heard of scagliola? I hadn’t, until Doris Collins challenged me, in the lobby of Shea’s. For a glimpse at the nuts and bolts of theater restoration, which includes scagliola and a lot more, catch this video! Among other things, you’ll learn that scagliola doesn’t feel cold to the touch, like marble.

3. Stay tuned, as we used to say in analogue days, for more on Curt Mangel; he gets around. 

Back when I was a little girl, before I operated — for one golden year — a movie palace (the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre to which this blog is dedicated), my mother, who’d been born in the early days of the 20th century, enchanted me with her tale of what movies were like before there were real theaters. Hard for a kid of the 1950’s to imagine, sitting on benches in an abandoned lot in downtown Toledo after sunset, watching a movie projected on a bed-sheet and waving “punk,” some kind of insect deterrent on a stick, to keep the mosquitoes away. As I recall, a woman played tunes on a beaten-up piano. By the time of this pop-up, Nickelodeons, which had been bare-bones storefronts, had already had their day; and Toledo didn’t have a bonafide movie theater — yet. By 1919, that would change, as the Empire on North St. Clair, a burlesque house, morphed into the Palace. That back lot with the bed sheet Mother recalled was precious to her. “The birth of the movies,” she called it, and so it was.

We still have improvised cinema... Just Google “pop-up movie theater,” and see what you get: everything from a glorified cubicle in the middle of terminal 4 at Kennedy Airport, where you can kill a few hours, to the charming and endless European summer outdoor theaters, that proliferate in the warm months. Many fill historic plazas such as the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna or Sala Montjuic in Barcelona, a festival held each year within the walls of the Montjuic castle. No wonder Europeans (except the Brits) don’t bother with drive-ins! Who needs ‘em! Or, for that matter, who needs a movie palace, when you’ve got a real castle to snuggle up next to! 

There are, of course, roof-top cinemas and hot-tub cinemas from London to L..A. You can even check out Pop-Up Magazine’s goings on at the Theatre at the Ace Hotel in L.A., which is multi-media. 
Then there’s the ultimate pop-up, my husband’s first theater. If you’ve been following this blog, you know about his second theater, the aforementioned St. George, which I had a hand in running with him for a year, but you may not have heard about the one he invented from scratch.

So here’s the story of the St. John’s Terrace Cinema, in Dean’s own words:  

"Well, it was a drive-in of sorts. The vehicles that were admitted for five cents each per rider (no carload rate) were bicycles, tricycles, Radio Flyer wagons and, of course, walk-up fare. And true to your mother’s story, there were benches, but also folding chairs, blankets, and the occasional crate. The screen was, indeed, a bed sheet, clipped to  a clothesline at the far end of Lester Lloyd’s backyard (Deer Park Ohio). Unbeknownst to me, I was in violation of the 1948 law which banned any entity from owning a studio, a film distributorship and a theater. With the exception of an 8 mm cartoon short, which we’d signed out of the public library, feature films were the product of my hastily-organized company, Big T Productions. They included such stellar titles as Bombing Attack Over Berlin, Bombing Attack Over Japanese Fleet, and The Attack of the Giant Invader. All three films were ten-minute silents, featuring plastic models of the planes and ships our fathers maneuvered throughout WWII, which, at that point lay just ten years in the past.    
      
On the third film, which, as I recall was supposed to have been a re-enactment of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the cinematographer, me, behind a hand-held Brownie 8 spring-powered movie camera (see photo above), caught most of Phil Tabaco’s wrist and all of his hand as he held the wing of a model Japanese Zero, dipping through our basement studio on its way to bomb a plastic model of the USS Arizona, tethered to a cardboard dock. 

We stopped production immediately. None of us understood the concept of film editing. At ten, we simply assumed films were shot scene-by-scene in order, same as we saw them in real theaters. We had promised the crowd at our recently-contrived St. John’s Terrace Cinema a brand-new feature for August, 1956, and so we had to figure out how Phil’s hand and wrist might enter into a Japanese attack. No problem--just change the genre from a war film to a war/horror film! Phil became the giant monster who rose from the Pacific to somehow defend the American fleet from all comers. 
Our crowd of just under twenty kids from the block loved it.  We re-wound and showed the film three times, no additional cost. 

And there was music! Just as your mother recalled a lady at a piano in that lot in Toledo, we had musical accompaniment. Lester sat at the upright in his parents’ dining room his back to the window that opened on the backyard. We had moved the mirror from his dresser and placed it on the piano, so Lester could watch the film and play appropriately along with the action. 

As I recall, the theme from the black-and-white TV series, Superman (dump de dum, dadada dump de dum) was repurposed often. Phil tore tickets at the gate; and yes, the producer /  director / cinematographer / projectionist (me) also ran concession. Popcorn, prepared by Mrs. Lloyd in the “theater kitchen” adjacent to the “music studio” went for two cents a bag, and drinks were various flavors of Kool-Aid, sold in sterilized soda bottles for four cents each. 

On one Saturday night in August, Lester, Phil and I divided the combined gate and concession: nearly two dollars three equal ways.  What did we do with all the money? What else? we went to the Deer Park Theatre two nights later! Twenty-five cents admission left us plenty of money to gorge on candy and popcorn."

Afterthought: Lester Lloyd spent most of his life as a professional musician; Phil Tabaco became a writer and lecturer on Sci Fi, and Dean (Thompson), as you know, went on to run a movie palace and then produce and direct television.

Quick! What’s the world’s oldest continuously operating movie theater?

If you were thinking it was San Francisco’s Victoria Theater — that would have been my guess — you’d be wrong. You might have thought it was the Plaza Grill and Cinema in Ottawa, Kansas. Now if you happen to live on the other side of the pond, near Marseilles, you’d be quick to point out that the Eden in La Ciotat, opened in 1895. But the crucial question is, “did it stay open?” Nope, having fallen into hard times, as so many theaters did in the seventies, its marquee was dark for a long time. The theater this site and blog are dedicated to, the St. George, in Staten Island, New York, a 2672-seat palace built in 1929 that I helped run in its last cinema year, 1976, would never have been in the running for oldest or longest continuous, having opened in the twenties and closed in ’77. 

Short drumroll.

The oldest continuously-operating movie theater in the world is, according to the Guiness Book of World Records, the State Theatre in Washington, Iowa, which showed its first film in 1897, via the beam of a cinematographe. This was a hand-cranked affair invented only two years before by those fathers of cinema, the Lumiere brothers.

But wait (as Ron Popeil, himself a showman, would say), there’s more!

Not only did the State (once the Graham Opera House) stay open all those years, it’s connected intimately to the very birth of cinema. Did you wonder what a cinematographe — there are fewer than 500 in the world — was doing in the middle of Iowa? 

Ever heard of William Franklin Brinton? A sort of Barnum and Bailey of early film, “Brinton,” according to The Guardian, “crossed the Midwest with his wife Indiana and his traveling show, welcoming locals for a ticket price of just a few cents. At first he showed magic lantern slides, some of which 'dissolved' between two static images to create an illusion of movement. When moving pictures arrived, Brinton jumped aboard, ordering many films from distributors in France, one of the most prolific and creative producers in the early period. He also became the manager of the Graham Opera House in Washington, Iowa...now known as the State Theater...Brinton’s programme included trick films such as those by Méliès, which used in-camera special effects to create fantastical spectacles, and many hand-coloured movies where the dye is applied directly to each frame.”

Flash forward the better part of a century to Michael Zahs, a retired Iowa history teacher, who like many of us, is a pack rat. He collects everything. The Brintons are long gone, but their collection is still very much alive, thanks to the fact that it fell — lantern slides, film, equipment and all — safely into the hands of Zahs. Phenomenally, it was stored until 2014 in a shed on Zahs’ property, where he repaired periodically to withdraw one curiosity or another, to show in various venues. Something of a showman himself, he’d picked up his predecessor’s habit of traveling with films from town to town. Seems Brinton’s original collection included a lot of lost work by George Melies, some of it on dangerous nitrate film. There was some back and forth with the Library of Congress over the years, mailing packages that had been duplicated, some, unbelieveably, labeled “explosive,” via the USPS. A lot of this stuff is unique, meaning no copies anywhere else in the world.

And now?

Thankfully, the shed on Zahs’ property will now probably not catch fire, at least not on account of volatile film stock. The University of Iowa is, since 2014, the new home of what’s being called The Brinton Entertainment Company, a collection of films, slides, projectors and other odds and ends, all donated by the industrious Michael Zahs. It’s now the subject of a documentary, Saving Brinton, which just aired on PBS, January 1, 2019. 

It’s an Iowa story, and the best part is that the documentarians, Tommy Haines and Andrew Sherburne, are Zahs’ neighbors.

On November 5, 2018, Saving Brinton, studded with awards, returned home for viewing at the State, after having toured four continents. 

There was a live act that night on stage at the State, The Pines, a local folk trio, two of its members former students of Zahs’. One of them, Alex Ramsey, said of performing on stage at his hometown movie house, that it was “Just an absolute honor and kind of a dream come true...” It was The Pines‘ first gig in Washington, Iowa. As for Brinton, he’s just come off the road one more time. 

Traditionally to mark the New Year, I run this reminiscence written by an original staffer, Paul Plonski, of closing down the St. George Theater before midnight, forty-two years ago.  Here it is, altered somewhat, with embellishments, and a series of “afterthoughts,” about the blog in general...
 
The movie had just gone off-screen at the St. George Theatre, our 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island. Gabe, our grizzled projectionist (returned to the fold after being disciplined by his union for TV watching in the booth) wanted to get on our good side. His shift over, he strode to the concession stand and slapped down on the glass display case a rather ordinary box of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies.
 
“Happy New Year!” He smiled at me, that crooked tobacco-stained grin of his. “These are for you and Dean. Yeah, yeah, I meant to give’m to you at Christmas, but I forgot...” He buttoned his peacoat and made for the street, his brief foray into sociability accomplished.
 
Paulie, who had the concession shift that night, was just shutting things down, counting change, locking the case. He pointed a pretend revolver at the back of the retreating projectionist, and fired a phantom bullet. I laughed, Dean patted Paulie on the back. Everybody knew Gabe’s hourly pay was $14.76. Rich as he was, the Entenmann’s seemed as puny as the gesture that had produced it. We hadn’t paid ourselves in months, and Paulie, worth eleven of Gabe, got minimum wage, $2.20 an hour. 
 
Dean stepped into the stand and grabbed Paulie’s Windex and rag.
 
“It’s almost midnight, and I imagine you’ve got other plans,” he told the kid, fourteen years his junior.
 
Thirty-eight years later, thanks to the internet, Paulie, in his fifties (these days an aeronautical engineer), found me via this website. We’re reacquainted as full adults since then, and I’m happy to say that his memory of that particular New Year’s Eve has become a traditional post for SW.
 
On that preternaturally cold night, we darkened the house, closed down the box office, locked the concession stand, threw the giant breakers to power down the marquee, and bolted the glass doors. We wished whoever remained good luck in the coming new year, 1977. Paulie jumped into his car, parked just below the marquee, and a few of us “management” folk straggled up the hill towards home and some eggnog I had ready. But Paulie’s night would be a little different:
 
You and Dean had made sure to get us out of the theater before midnight so we could make it home in time.
 
My ‘68 Pontiac Firebird was parked on Hyatt Street, right in front of the theater. At around 11:30 I got in, started the car, but could not get it into gear. So...at midnight I was still on the hill, waiting for a tow truck, the cold wind blowing. I was freezing.
 
[It was around 15 degrees F that night, with wind gusts off the harbor of up to 25 mph; in fact, New Year’s Eve in NYC, ’76 is tied with ’96 for the fifth coldest Dec 31st in recorded weather history].
 
Quiet, except for the wind. Then at the stroke of midnight, the ships in the harbor sounded their whistles and shot off fireworks. It was just me, the wind and the ships with the NYC skyline, a night to cherish forever. PS: The New Years party was still raging when I made it home (nothing missed).
 
Privation, exhilaration. These fit my overall experience of running the theater in 1976 and the first few months of 1977. It was going to be a cold cold winter; we’d be out, broke, by spring. But the theater, while it lasted, was itself a kind of fireworks, a lit spark I try to keep going, in these blog posts.
 
Thanks again, Paulie...and Happy New Year.
 
Peace to everyone... And in the coming year don’t forget to like us on FB, and don’t be shy about comments...and, if you can, find a local movie palace of your own to support.
 
Afterthoughts:
None of these thoughts has anything to do with New Year’s Eves past or present...
 
Afterthought 1:  Radio City Music Hall’s perils, mentioned in last week’s blog post,  raised some interesting responses from many dancers who worked at the Hall. I am  now pleased to number among my friends Rosemary Novellino, thefounder of The Show people’s Committee to Save Radio City Music Hall, and author of Saving Radio City Music Hall: a Dancer’s True Story.Comments from alumna rockettes have come in via FB Message, some of which I’ll be adding to the blog’s comments column, as I get permission. A lot of people breathed sighs of relief when the NYC Landmarks Commission ruled in favor of saving Manhattan’s only remaining palace below 175th Street. 
 
Afterthought 2:  A blog post on Shea’s Performing Arts Center Buffalo with, I promise, a fascinating sub-story of the man who slept in that theater to keep it from being stripped of its Tiffany-designed elements and its remarkable theater organ, is forthcoming.
 
3.  A dance review on December 24, by Alastair Macaulay in The New York Times, “E Pluribus Nutcracker,”  turns out to have been, among other things, a hymn to my beloved St. George Theatre, and I quote:
 
The St. George is a marvel too little known outside Staten Island. The 2,800-seat theater, built in 1929, was intended as a home for vaudeville and cinema to vie with those across the water on Broadway. After coming close to demolition at the start of this century, it has been lovingly restored. The foyers and balconies are fabulously ornate. Auditorium, front-of-house areas...are spectacular.
 
Sailing past the Statue of Liberty on his way home, Macaulay seems to be making the point that the whole trip, to and from Manhattan, is part of the adventure, 
 
On the way back from Staten Island, the Statue of Liberty seemed a perfect part of a “Nutcracker” day. Like the Sugar Plum Fairy, she welcomes strangers and embraces diversity.