This just in from Variety:
China closed swathes of cinemas on Friday in response to the outbreak of novel coronavirus which started in the city of Wuhan and has now killed 26 people [old news: the figure is up to 106 as of this writing]. The closures come a day after the distributors and producers of the seven major blockbusters that had expected to launch from Jan. 25 cancelled their films’ releases.

Chinese New Year is the commercial high point of the cinema industry year in mainland China, with well over $1 billion of box office revenue normally anticipated to flow through turnstiles in a week of celebration and family gatherings. It is also the peak time of year for internal travel, when typically half of China’s 1.4 billion population return to their hometowns to be reunited with family....

​Cinema chains closing their theaters include Wanda, Dadi, Lumiere Pavilions, Emperor, Bona and CGV. But, for the moment, the closures are not nationwide, nor total. China counted some 70,000 screens in 11,000 complexes at the end of 2019.

Variety — which famously announced the day after the 1929 Crash that Wall Street had “...laid an egg,” — is all about showbiz, so may seem a little callous in light of the current epidemic. Still, as a former theater operator, the piece got me to thinking. 

In 2019, according to the National Association of Theater Operators, there were 41,172 screens. in the U.S. With movie theater attendance in trouble everywhere here, thanks to binge-watching, streaming, and other activities we all indulge in, it’s clear we’re losing, rather than gaining, screens. Netflix barely aired Scorceses’ The Irishman before retiring it for home viewing, and you don’t have to ask your friends if they paid for tickets to all the Oscar-nominated flicks available now on the big screen in your bedroom. We don’t go out to the movies the way we used to; or the way the Chinese clearly still do.

The movie palace I was involved in operating for one year, 1976, The St. George Theatre in Staten Island, New York, had at that time 2, 672 seats, all facing a single screen. In the thirties, forties and fifties, movie palaces had pretty much blanketed the continent, when the movies were a twice or thrice weekly way of life, a babysitting service, a place to get free dishes, and the only way to see a news program (newsreels), or enjoy a cartoon. But by ’76, it had all changed: palaces were on the way out. 

Our St. George was a sparsely populated cave of sorts, and still, with its copious balcony and loge, it managed to have a lot of life.
  
Here’s a glimpse from an earlier post:  
You can get lost in a movie palace: we knew it, and the younger patrons who didn’t want to go home knew it too. The balcony and loge were off limits — we hardly ever sold enough tickets to populate even the orchestra. But kids of a certain age — boys who are thirteen, fourteen — like to test limits. Exit doors in the balcony led to fire escapes. Although we weren’t using the balcony, the FDNY had forbidden us to chain these doors shut. So one kid would buy a ticket and sneak upstairs to let his friends, who had climbed the fire escape, in for free. For the most part, they’d hang in the upper part of the house 'til closing time, even bringing their own concession: beer and KFC. Pot-smoke drifted to the dome. On Friday and Saturday nights after the midnight show, you could hear them breathing up there, waiting for us to close and go home.  

Addressing them directly was the best way to flush them out. Sam, the floor manager, who knew all the kids’ families, would stand center stage and call them by name, “You up there Randall?...Nicky, hear me now. Don make me tell yo Mama...” 

Exit doors on unoiled hinges groaned, followed by the rapid slap of sneakers flying down the fire escape.

What did they want? How many Snickers bars can one adolescent boy consume? Or was it a night in the shadows back stage they were after? 

The theater was a magic — even a sacred — space, a kind of human-made cave. Tired as I was at the end of a work day, it was hard to go home, so who could fault a boy?  
​
The St. George was, for all of us, our Luray Caverns, our Lascaux, the screen, a cave-wall waiting for the splash of pigmented light. 

Afterthought:
This post, in an earlier version, aired on 2/10/15, garnering the following response from friend of Starts Wednesday, Clifford Browder:
You claim you were novices trying to run the St. George profitably, but in some ways you showed wisdom. Your handling of young adolescent boys, for example -- you did it just right. At that age I wasn't letting friends in for free, but I confess that I and a friend may have sent a candy wrapper or two spiraling down from the balcony to the orchestra … until an usher caught us and made us go sit downstairs. But there is karmic justice: in the same spot in the balcony I and that same friend were so horrified by the spectacle of a villain about to be eaten by crocodiles that we cowered down on the floor, where we couldn't see the screen. Probably missed the best part of that B movie.

The American movie-going experience, from its inception until nearly the 1970’s, contains a parallel universe, a reflection in a shiny surface: black theaters. In some African American neighborhoods, smaller theaters supported black audiences. In larger cities, theaters, palaces big enough to accommodate a separate audience in the balcony, used that space to bring black/white audiences together — all the while keeping them apart. Such was life before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made segregation in public spaces illegal. For seven years, I’ve been working on Starts Wednesday: a Year in the Life of a Movie Palace, and for six of those years writing this blog; still there’s the unanswered question. Was outright segregation practiced in our beloved movie palace? We became theater operators at the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat house, in Staten Island, in 1976. The day we opened those red and gold doors for business, twelve years had elapsed since the Civil Rights Act. I haven’t yet found the person who’ll tell me if African Americans were welcomed by our predecessors, but it’s likely, given the practices of the day, that some or another discouragement kept black audiences out.  
 
In 1976, we inherited mixed audiences from the operator who preceded us: a largely white suburban population — that had moved out of our neighborhood to newer subdivisions on the South Shore of Staten Island — and a mixed local white and black population, who kept, at times, an uneasy peace with one another. On April 7 of our theater year, we opened, ironically, with Mel Brooks’ still-controversial Blazing Saddles, a satire about race that Brooks admits he probably couldn’t make today. The American worm of racial attitude was just beginning to change, and thanks to what we were learning about our audiences, we were changing too, walking toward the light.
 
Last year a friend sent me a wonderful article on the city of Birmingham (Alabama) and its theater restorations: another revitalization story, thrilling! Any theater saved is a welcome miracle; but surprise!  Two of the theaters listed as restored were black houses, during the Jim Crow era.  Reading about them, I got all excited and googled BLACK THEATERS RESTORED. Then, AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATERS RESTORED. Okay, I found a few, and there’s always the compelling story of the Apollo on 125th Street in Harlem. 
 
But like so much else having to do with things black and white in America, results in the black column are a little disappointing. There just aren’t that many. I’m sure it’s a tale of bucks: it can take as much as fifty million dollars and, working on the fast track, five years, to restore a run-down theater, even a small one, according to Jerry Martinez of Martinez and Johnson, an architectural firm out of D.C. It’s about deep pockets and lots of time, and donors able to give. These things are scarce everywhere, but can be doubly hard to come by in black communities. 
 
Still, despite discouragements, I present a few tales of black theater restoration; with time, may there be more.
 
The previously-mentioned Lincoln Theatre in Bessemer, Alabama comes to mind first. The Lincoln, has been bought and is being slowly restored by Andre Holland of Moonlight, who remembers this movie house from his boyhood, apparently not as a theater he attended, but as a vacant space next to a local barbershop, that was, nonetheless, filled with memories for most of the older people he knew. Since last year, The Holland Project has received at least two sizable grants, one for facade work, and is proceeding with plenty of support. A Cinema Treasures entry reflects how neglected it was until Holland came along. He notes, "It's good for people — particular young people — to have something to be proud of in their neighborhood... The Lincoln was [before 1964] the only movie theatre you could go to. Everyone who went has memories of it. They remember first dates there, they remember the titles of all the movies they saw." A 400-seat theater built in 1948, the Lincoln has a balcony — likely in a stadium configuration — and orchestra, and functioned until around 1970. Before Holland entered, there were two other Lincoln enthusiasts who got the ball of restoration rolling forward: Jake Bivona, a local attorney and “big movie fan” formed the Lincoln Phoenix Project back in 2013, apparently enlisting the efforts of an actor and filmmaker, Kevin Wayne, best known for his role in The Magnificent 7. Wayne shot a documentary, which has never had a showing. Now that the Holland Project is on the way, he may post it, in its entirety, on YouTube. One thing is clear; when the Lincoln is complete it will offer both movies and live acts and give a needed boost to Bessemer’s sad downtown — so much of what theater restoration is all about.
 
The Howard Theater in Washington, D.C. is the oldest African American theater in the U.S., predating even the Apollo. Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown, Aretha Franklin and a number of other performers have graced its stage. Martinez (quoted earlier) recalls that the Howard was in pretty dismal shape, “...It had been vacant for decades when we started work on it. It was a solid building, but the interior was totally gone. The only thing that was left was the shape of the proscenium and the shape of the balcony.”
 
The Howard opened in August, 1910, a legitimate/Vaudeville house, its facade done in Beaux-Arts, Neo-Classical, and Italian Renaissance styles. Apollo, at the top of the facade, played his lyre over T Street, while the inside featured a copious balcony with eight boxes and a proper number of dressing rooms. Not surprisingly, the Howard Players from nearby Howard University often took the stage, as well as the Lafayette Players.
 
The ups and downs of the Howard mirror the trials of many palatial theaters from the thirties into the bad old seventies. Serving mostly black audiences, and, beginning in the early Depression, black movies, like Herb Jeffries cowboy flicks, along with live acts, the theater was a hot spot, attracting top talent like Lena Horne, and offering competitions, like its rival, the Apollo, in New York. During WWII, it hosted  a number of balls, attended by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and, in these instances, offered the likes of Abbott and Costello and Danny Kaye, in addition to popular black performers.
 
Though management was black, the theater seems always to have been owned by white management companies, during its serious working years. These companies faded away by the fifties, when the Howard went Rock and Blues. Beyond the fall of single-screen movie theaters, two things did the Howard in: ironically, desegregation, and the riots of the late sixties. It served briefly as a church, then simply closed, despite its designation on the National Historic Register. 
 
Its recent re-opening in 2012 after a full restoration by Martinez and Johnson, have given the Howard renewed purpose, recalling its peak during wartime. As the theater’s website observes, “When the nation was deeply divided by segregation, The Howard Theatre provided a place where color barriers blurred and music unified. The Washington Bee dubbed it the ‘Theatre for The People’...the place where dignitaries, like President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the First Lady gathered with everyday folks to see both superstars and rising stars...” Billy Eckstine, Billy Taylor, the Ink Spots, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Chuck Brown, Aretha Franklin, Dizzy Gilespie, Dick Gregory, Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley (I haven’t even gotten started) either debuted there, or used the Howard as a touchstone for their careers. Like the Apollo and the Cotton Club in Harlem, the Howard seems to have survived and prospered by vaulting over the impediment of segregation.
 
Finally, here’s a brief nod to the Carver Performing Arts Center in Birmingham, a city on fire — in the good sense — with theater restoration. The Carver Theatre was an African American cinema, opened in 1935 with roughly five hundred seats. Recent restoration has made it, among other things, the new home of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame Museum. The theater’s location in what is considered the Birmingham Civil Rights District probably made restoration a must-do for local civic officials, and a good thing too.
 
If single-screen theaters of all kinds suffered vacancy and neglect in the seventies, from a combination of multi-plexing and television, then other factors, like white flight (which one way or another has never gone away), and the desegregation of public places, put additional pressure on black theaters coast-to-coast. Fortunately, people of all backgrounds love their local theaters, and there’s always someone willing to fight to preserve, restore or rebuild them. 
 
Afterthoughts: 

1. I didn’t include more than a nod to the Apollo in this post, as it seems such an obvious example of a black theater with a fascinating past, but if you want to read a little about it, here’s a good treatment.  
2. For a glimpse at how the neighborhood near the Howard (and its sister, Howard University) has gentrified, read this.  
3. For a glimpse of life in the balcony of a segregated theater and full discussion of black theaters before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, don’t miss this NPR discussion.

This just in:  The Avalon, a small atmospheric palace on Santa Catalina Island, off the coast of Southern California, has officially closed its doors as a dedicated movie theater. 

Never having been to Santa Catalina, the ear worm I’m now fighting in my head is, what else, the Four Preps’, “Twenty-six miles across the sea, Santa Catalina is a-waitin’ for me/ Santa Catalina, the island of/ romance, romance, romance, romance.”  What is it about islands?

This blog happens to be dedicated to another island movie palace, The St. George Theatre in Staten Island, which I helped to run for one magical entirely exhausting year, 1976. Staten Island, one of NYC’s five boroughs, is a far cry from Santa Catalina, but hey, an island is an island! 

There are some pretty fascinating island movie houses in places I’ve been. Take for example the Fishers’ Island Cinema on its own isle, nestled in Long Island Sound and snuggled between New York and the Connecticut shore. A writing group I belong to does a retreat off-season at Fishers each fall. We always pass the cinema on our way to the retreat, but I’ve never been to a movie there, because it’s always closed by September. Not many people winter on Fishers, ferry service being what it is. I understand the F.I. Cinema was built by the army in 1932 when that remote locality was at least half military base. These days, summers only, the cinema serves whoever’s occupying the windswept houses on bluffs and beaches, and a tiny year-round population.
 
On Chincoteague, a more famous island off the coast of Virginia, and a wild place if ever there was one, ponies run in the surf. The Island Roxy is the only surviving movie house on Chincoteague, where once there were three; and like the theater on Fishers, it’s closed off-season. The Roxy started its career in 1945. When the movie based on Misty of Chincoteague, the classic horsy child’s book, premiered, none other than that pony led the parade down the main street. In fact, Misty’s hoof-prints are set in cement in front of the Roxy, to commemorate the occasion. 

No doubt island movie theaters are special, as islands themselves are. If theaters everywhere are in a struggle, in this age of streaming, then island theaters may serve as a kind of microcosm of a theater’s demise — or triumph. 

The Avalon (Santa Catalina) has a rich history, so I’ll focus on it. After ninety years of steady exhibition, it ended its movie-house career on New Years Eve, in a quiet last showing of an unremarkable movie,  with about 40 people in the audience. Because it’s in Southern California, home of Hollywood, it likely won’t be torn down or boarded up. Rumor has it that it will stay in the market place for special bookings, somewhere on the pattern of The Theater at the Ace Hotel in L.A.; but it can’t count, as it used to, on regular walk-in business. If it were so unfortunate as to not be near L.A., the Avalon might not survive at all. 

​Here’s a description of its interior, quoted directly from its Cinema Treasures entry:
A truly classic movie palace, situated in Avalon on Santa Catalina Island, just 22 miles off the coast from Los Angeles. The Avalon Theatre opened on May 29, 1929 with Douglas Fairbanks in The Iron Mask. It is located in the Casino Building, built by chewing gum magnet William Wrigley Jnr, and is located beneath the Casino Ballroom. The building was never intended for or used as a casino, but for dancing (which in the era of the ‘big bands’ attracted the likes of Benny Goodman — the 'King of Swing' to play here to 2,000 capacity dancers. The outer lobby of the building has eight ‘Atlantis’ inspired tiled mural panels, the work of John Gabriel Beckman, who decorated the entire Avalon Theatre in an Atmospheric style. There are painted murals on the side-walls depicting a noble savage hunting deer with a bow & arrow, as a few Franciscan monks arrive by galleon surrounded by stylized hillsides. The rear wall has painted murals of birds and monkeys.

Above the rounded proscenium arch is a re-creation of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus”, whilst on the asbestos safety curtain is painted “Flight of Fancy Westward”, depicting a primitive surfer boy riding the crest of a wave, superimposed on a background of the map of the island. The silver leaf ceiling is made to glow in shades of pink and violet by colored lights hidden behind a low wall surrounding the auditorium.

The Avalon Theatre is equipped with a Page 4 manual 16 rank theatre organ, built by the Page Organ Co. of Lima, Ohio. It is still in working order and is played regularly at film performances on weekends only. Films played daily every evening of the week and were a mix of first run and classic silent movies. The complex is still owned by the Wrigley family who keep the building well maintained.

Love the surfer boy on the safety curtain!

That Page organ was in action for the last show, on New Year’s Eve, as described by The L.A. Weekly:
About an hour before the nightly 6:30 p.m. screening, organist Jon Tusak sat down...and began pumping out a free-flowing, almost jazzy instrumental mash-up of “If I Only Had a Brain,” the always poignant “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and other tunes from The Wizard of Oz. As Tusak kneaded the keys and pulled the organ’s stops, birds in the walls and ceiling of the theater chirped along excitedly in a merrily demented sing-along. 

Since the Avalon is atmospheric, the birds were preceded by, “tiny lights inside the constellations decorating the vast universe of the Avalon’s high, expansive white ceiling.” 

Although I’ve never been to the Avalon, the lush Cinema Treasures description of its interior makes me feel like I have. 

And what about those Beckman murals of Atlantis? All the islands I’ve cited here, with the exception of my own Staten Island, are tiny, while Atlantis, which may or may not have existed thousands of years ago in the Atlantic Ocean done in by a giant flood, was, so they say, an island continent before it sank. 
Now Atlantis is probable myth, cited by Plato as an allegory, but I’ll take it as an operant metaphor for the demise of movie theaters everywhere, each one an island, sinking below our bad habits of just staying home and binge-watching.

Whether you’re on an island or not, go out to the movies. Do it now!  

Afterthoughts:
1. For a fascinating treatment of how the Atlantis allegory was taken up in the 19th century by various adventurous thinkers, check this out.  

2. Avalon, BTW, was also a legendary island, in Arthurian legend, the place where the sword Excalibur was forged. Told you islands were special!

3. Thanks to The L.A. Weekly, cited above, and to my friend and colleague, Robin Locke Monda, whose link to the Weekly’s, “The Last Picture Show:  Southern California’s Most Beautiful Movie Theater Closes,” got me thinking about islands.   

“'What kind of work is running a movie house?’ my father-in-law asked. Who knew? Not us, until we opened the New Yorker. It ran through the sixties and early seventies: a golden age in cinema, turbulent in politics — French New Wave on our screen, ’68 uprisings at Columbia University. An Upper West Side hub became, as Bernardo Bertolucci dubbed it, ‘a kind of wild cinema university, like Henn Langlois’s Cinematheque in Paris.’ We were young film buffs, learning as we went. Not knowing where we were going. The theater is gone, but its marquee still glimmers in my mind. As we shaped it, it shaped us. Movies, moviegoers, our own lives unspooled on one ongoing reel. The New Yorker became our anchor, where time and place converged. I thought it would go on forever.”
--The New Yorker Theater and Other Stories From at Life at the Movies, by Toby Talbot, 2009.
 
As a an ex-movie-house operator (St. George Theatre, Staten Island, 1976) I try to keep up on the history and art of theater management, such as it is; how could I have missed the story of another couple struggling to keep a movie theater open? And not just one theater, but a series, eventually, of three! 

The New Yorker Theatre has been gone for some time — a sad story — but Toby and her husband Dan went on to run three other Manhattan art houses: Cinema Studio, the Metro and, finally, Lincoln Plaza Cinemas which lasted till 2009. Toby and Dan (he’s sadly now deceased) are celebrities of sorts in the rag-tag fraternity of ex-movie theater operators. They lasted long enough to actually retire! —whereas most of the rest of us, myself and husband included, washed out and went on to other careers. That said, we have some things in common with the Talbots. 

What kind of work, after all, IS running a movie house? My mother, back in Ohio, didn’t ask. It was enough that her daughter had run off — at the end of her junior year in Cincinnati. It was New York City I ended up in, involving myself in all sorts of nebulous and flaky enterprises. By 1976 I was running a movie theater with my husband, who’d briefly worked for two celebrities, then failed as a freelance TV producer. Our theater, the St. George, was hardly an art house. On the Staten Island side of the harbor, it had a daunting number (2, 672) seats to fill; meanwhile, who in our audience knew from Bertolucci? He’d envisioned the New Yorker as a “wild cinema university,” while the only thing wild at the St. George was the audience itself, which demanded, “action,”  as much as they could get. We gave it to them: Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,  mixed in with genre-benders like Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Well, it was a living.

Like the Talbots, we didn’t know where we were going, learning — as they were — while we went. They just got farther than we did; well, they were in Manhattan, where support for what they were doing kept them more or less in the black.

The theater, she says, “...is gone but its marquee still glimmers in my mind.” Amen, sister. I miss the glimmer of our old marquee, though it leaked badly and was problematic to keep lit and set – with those very breakable aluminum marquee letters. Changing them once a week required heroics of great proportion on the part of one teenage staffer or another, teetering on a rickety wooden ladder on an uphill slant, often as not in the wind. 

Our theater, these days, still stands and, is, remarkably, open, getting its living mostly from live acts of major and minor proportion, Doo-wop revivals, K.D.Lang, you name it. A hard-working local family keeps the new electronic marquee lit and everything in order. A classic red velvet and gilded plaster cave of a theater, it was always all about the building. And, though our sweeping “wide” screen with its grape soda stains is long gone, new management has acquired a modest screen on which to run the occasional film series. Well it ain’t a rep house, but anyplace that shows movies in this age of streaming has my vote. 

“As we shaped it, it shaped us,”  Talbot notes; I agree completely. While she and Dan went on to run three cherished art houses, we got a seat-of-our-pants one-year education in running a storefront business, which served us well in future endeavors. Selling tickets, worrying about how to pay the carting company or get together enough money for a downpayment on The Exorcist, sweating how to make payroll for our largely teenage staff (minimum wage $2.30 cents an hour) — grew us up.

And there is nothing like watching a great movie in bits and pieces, dropping in to sit down for parts of Silent Movie, or Blazing Saddles. It was quite an era. Eight of the films we ran have made it into the Library of Congress, some of the best Hollywood had to offer in the turbulent seventies. Other films we screened are cult classics, like Cooley High. 

Talbot reflects, “I thought it would go on forever.”  I’ll second that motion. That’s how it is when you’re still under thirty.

Afterthoughts:
1. I was privileged once, as a patron of the New Yorker, to hear Myrna Loy speak before a screening of The Thin Man, just one of the many joys the Talbots provided. 

2. Recently I profiled an all-volunteer effort to resurrect the art house tradition on the Upper West Side, just across the street from the Talbots’ last theater, the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, whose marquee has been blank since 2009. This group of enthusiasts are hoping to resurrect the Lincoln Plaza, and, who knows?

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-three years ago.  Here it is, altered somewhat, with embellishments...and an afterthought.

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.

As an afterthought, I offer up a poem I wrote forty-three years ago, “At the Box Office;” I found it in a box of journal entries rescued from my garage. Such is the life of the writer.

At the Box Office
Selling tickets last night
I got into a conversation with a drunk
who said, “Selling tickets must be pretty dull,”
and I said,
“I meet some pretty interesting people.”
He said, “You don’t talk to them though,
just sell’m tickets,
but wait a minute — you’re talking to me.”
I said, “Someday I may write a book about this place
and you may be in it.”
He said, “Be sure you spell my name right,”
and I said, “If you’re in my book you won’t be yourself exactly.”
He said, 
         “Like a myth?”

*       *       *