What kind of civilization invents the movies? A place where you can sit in the dark and dream
the same dream the citizen next to you is dreaming? — all while sticking your hand into a bag of buttered grain that has been exploded (Zea mays everta, aka popcorn).  

The movies were everything to America once. In 1930, at the start of the Great Depression, Americans went to the movies 95 million times a week (our population in those days was roughly 125 million). Movie theaters, especially the palaces, were the ultimate and only places many people ever went when they went out: the dating scene, the after-church matinee. They served as virtual babysitting agencies, where mothers could drop kids for a Saturday afternoon. Smaller neighborhood theaters followed, until by the 1950’s the map of America was studded with movie houses. Then came the decline: in 1943, despite the war, Americans had spent 25.7 percent of their recreation budgets in movie theaters, a figure which dropped to 5.2% by 1960, and, by 1976, when I signed on at the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, as part of a group of optimistic young entrepreneurs, determined to keep an aging movie palace open for business, that figure had plummeted to less than 2.9%. It was a terrible year in the business sense. We lost our shirts, but, with its 2,672 mostly vacant seats, it’s deliciously ornate Spanish Baroque inner sanctum with perfect acoustics and its giant stained movie screen, the St. George, among other things, helped me become a writer. 

How many other writers had an opportunity to work in a movie palace? Dunno. But I do know a number of folks who’ve written about going to the movies. Here’s the inimitable Frank O’Hara addressing the mothers of America as only he can (from "Ave Maria"):

Mothers of America
----let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to   
it’s true that fresh air is good for the body
—--but what about the soul   
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images
and when you grow old as grow old you must
—--they won’t hate you   
they won’t criticize you they won’t know
—--they’ll be in some glamorous country   
they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey
they may even be grateful to you
—--for their first sexual experience...
 
O’Hara is blending the babysitting function of theaters with the sexual-initiation ritual, every bit as important to audiences. So what about that?

What about sex at the movies?

In Variety Photoplays, by Edward Field, (poem: "Graffiti") a patron of that beloved Third Avenue theater  (now sadly torn down) breaks into the famously sleazy men’s room and cuts away an old wooden partition between stalls that was about to be replaced.

It’s what was written/carved on the old partition he wants to haul back to his flat (from Graffiti An Excerpt from Sex Stories):

...and telephone numbers saying "call me,"
and dates and times when free and where
and descriptions of partners wanted
and acts and roles desired:
----Sex slave, white, looking for black master
----Got a sister? Fix me up. Signed, Desperate
----Couple marie cherche troisieme
----Have six hard inches meet me here tonight
 
(Poems from Variety Photoplays don’t seem to be readily available on line, so you can find “Graffiti” in its entirety at the end of this blog post).  
 
In "Scary Movies," Kim Addonizio remembers time spent,

...at the Baronet Theater where I sat helpless   
between my older brothers, pumped up   
on candy and horror...
 
I remember well The Exorcist, how it played off the shadows and statuary of the St. George in 1976. As for the horrors that follow Addonizio, I sympathize, having lived a whole life haunted by various undead entities.

I also, BTW, remember well the Baronet (and its twin the Coronet) on Third Avenue.

In "A New Reality is Better Than a New Movie!", Amiri Baraka observes:

...On all the/screens of america, the joint blows up every hour and a half for two dollars and fifty cents./

Well, not every single screen, but a lot of them. When we were running the St. George, gunfire and things blowing up sold more popcorn  than the world’s best love story, so we booked more Taxi Driver than Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea.

In my movie palace year, we could never keep people from talking while the movie was on screen; sometimes the crowd gathered under our dome reminded me of people in an open-air market place, like the one in Casablanca. Here’s Robert Polito on the subject of not talking:
 
from "Please Refrain from Talking During the Movie": 

When I can’t make you understand I repeat myself
I repeat
 
If you don’t stop asking me all these questions how
Will I understand anything
 
Please refrain from talking during the movie
 
I need a life that isn’t just about needing
To escape my life
...

Escaping your life is a big part of the movie dream. An old teacher of mine, Hollis Frampton, a Structuralist filmmaker, used to say that, “A good movie ought to make you forget ‘...the love you’ve lost, your toothache and the balance in your checkbook.’”

Alas, during our time at the St. George, I never ever forgot the negative balance in the theater’s checkbook, but then we were only the keepers of the dream, not the dreamers: proprietors trying to scrape enough money together to book the next film.  

Here’s an ekphrastic poem by Joseph Stanton, riffing off an Edward Hopper painting, New York Movie: 
 
We can have our pick of seats.
Though the movie's already moving,
the theater's almost an empty shell.
----All we can see on our side
of the room is one man and one woman--
as neat, respectable, and distinct
----as the empty chairs that come
between them.
 
That’s just the way I remember the St. George on so many afternoons and evenings, a couple of hundred people in a sea of mostly empty seats. Hopper’s painting dates back to 1939, an era we don’t usually associate with empty movie houses. Hopper used a couple of theaters as his models — the Strand, the Globe and the Republican — before settling in at the Palace Theater on West 47th Street.  That’s supposedly the model for the painting. And speaking of models, if you’re an Edward Hopper fan, you know the lady at the lunch counter in his well-known painting, Nighthawks?  That’s his wife, Jo Hopper, the same woman standing to the right in his movie theater painting.
           
 Here are just a few lines from "Theater Ruin," part of a longer poem called “The Body Opened:”
​
A temple to the dark, house of shadows.
The jazzman in his spangled suit eats his eternal hotdog
and watches one more movie through the glass,
 
mumbling old lovers to himself.
The shaggy woman in the marquee’s shadow
warns as we pass.
           
And the projectionist who stashed
his television just outside the booth
is here too in some lost atom.
 
The poem is, as a matter of fact, mine, written in the mid eighties (when it found a home in an issue of Southern Poetry Review). You can check out more on "the jazzman" here. At the time I was convinced the St. George would be torn down. It was not, and I’m grateful to those who have kept that from happening.

As promised, here is the full text of the Edward Field poem:
 
Graffiti     
----An Excerpt from Sex Stories
 
When the Men’s Room was being demolished
to make way for a newer model, all steel and cement,
he broke in, holding his breath against the ancient stink,
and cut out an old wooden partition between the booths,
with its writings and pictures, and its glory holes,
some sealed repeatedly by the authorities
and others barely begun
where defects in the wood allowed pencil points to dig in
and one well-used one hacked out with knives and fingernails
with dried come encrusted on the rim
decorated with lips of mouth and cunt,
and around that, the cheeks of an ass;
 
...and telephone numbers saying “call me,”
and dates and times when free and where
and descriptions of partners wanted
and acts and roles desired:
----Sex slave, white, looking for black master
----Got a sister? Fix me up. Signed, Desperate
----Couple marie cherche troisieme
----Have six hard inches meet me here tonight
and true sex stories written out at length,
and instructive drawings of the sex organs in all positions
some half-washed out by the char, or painted over
but dug so deep or traced lovingly so often
they were still visible through the paint;
and still faintly seen but nearly overwhelmed at last,
the political slogans of past generations.
 
He took that whole wall, the size of a school blackboard,
figured over as it was like an oriental temple,
the work of a people, a folk artifact,
the record of lifetimes of secret desires,
the forbidden and real history of man,
and leaving it just as it was, hung it up in his house.
 
Respecting tradition
he charged everyone a nickel to see it.
 
Edward Field

While I was busy going broke running a movie palace in Staten Island, the St. George Theatre, there were moments when some of us involved in that adventure, gave it all up and took the ferry into Manhattan — a 23-minute crossing, then a hop onto the subway and you could lose yourself for a while in the East Village. Once or twice we ended up on Second Avenue and 9th Street at Veselka — a 24-hour Ukrainian restaurant which still serves the borscht of the gods, or in the seedy Ukrainian National Home, a cheaper bowl of soup. How I wish I’d caught Springsteen at the Palladium on 14th Street, but we were just too poor. Mostly I wandered the streets, dipping in and out of head shops, passing by places that intrigued me. One such was Variety Photo Plays, a theater whose marquee I can easily say was the exhibition equivalent of a high-end dessert, something on the order of meringue glacee, red and white by day, glowing red/orange at night. I never went inside, which saddens me now that it no longer exists.

The Variety was, until its demise in 2005, one of the few original nickelodeons  still standing. By 1976, it had morphed into a porn house, if one with an interesting history. That year, we showed Scorcese’s Taxi Driver on our Staten Island screen. Little did we know that the Variety had served as a location site, the scene in which DeNiro’s character first meets Foster’s; and around the corner from the Variety, the movie’s final shootout actually took place. So, in our outer borough movie palace, we’d created a mirror for the funky streets of the East Village just across the water.

What exactly was “Variety Photoplays?”  Why “photoplays” and not “movies?” According to The New York Times (1989) the original owner, a man named Valensi, an early Nickelodeon entrepreneur who built the theater, probably “sought an association with legitimate theater endeavors, of which 14th Street had been a center since the 1850's.” Nickelodeons, which Variety initially was, were cheap (a nickel); in the eyes of the tonier crowd who enjoyed opera at the 4000-seat Academy of Music on 14th St. just around the corner, motion pictures were, well, too vulgar. 

This of course would change rather quickly; in fact, the great movie palaces were built explicitly to compete for the entertainment interests of the opera crowd. In the Union Square area, these high-brows dined afterward at August Luchow’s palatial restaurant on the south side of 14th Street. Accordingly, close to Luchow’s, in 1926, a lavish Thomas Lamb movie palace rose up. The old (Academy of Music) opera house had by this time been demolished, so movie palace mogul William Fox, took the opportunity to christen his new theater (what else?) The Academy of Music. (It kept this name until the 1970’s, when it morphed into the Palladium, a Ron Delsener rock venue, where I could have caught the Boss, if I hadn’t been broke).

I could do an entire history of the evolution of entertainment in New York, concluding with the birth of movie palaces, and never leave the corner of 14th and Third!  The humble Variety Photo Plays (formally opened in 1914) was, a little more than ten years later, already an anachronism.  “Designed by Louis Sheinart, the exterior...was in plain brick, generally unornamented except for arcaded piers projecting above a sloping tiled false roof....Inside, the auditorium was fairly plain, but did have a slightly pitched floor and fixed seats, still novel touches in an industry that had started only recently with plain benches and sheets hung on a wall.” (New York Times).

In 1923, to compete with the onslaught of movie palaces, Variety treated itself to a marquee, designed by Julius Eckman, re-embellished seven years later, by Boak & Paris. Oh that marquee. Until the day in  2005 when the little theater was finally demolished, the marquee spoke to me and to other passers-by, of an era long-gone, the infancy of film itself. Boak & Paris hadn’t altered its underside, “a coffered field with regularly spaced bulbs,” according to the Times, but had stitched on “a zigzag Art Deco fascia in enameled metal and neon lighting.” The fascia gave ...”the theater's, rather than the show's, name...” recalling "..."the period when movies were more of a generic product. The lights buzzing on the underside of the marquee, when they were on, enveloped the passerby in a warm, glowing field.” That field, as I remember it, was a dazzling Tequila Sunrise orange at night. Film fare at the Variety was already grade B by 1930, and would gradually slip over the decades to what the Times finally describes, in 1989, as “raunchy to naughty to pornographic...” adding "...a slightly forbidden, Coney Island spice to the building.”

You can find a bit of that Coney Island spice in a fine reminiscence, by Mykola Dementiuk (Lambda Literary). His tribute to the gay porn days of love in a darkened theater is as much about the book Variety Photo Plays by the poet Edward Field, as it is about the theater itself. Here’s some of what Dementiuk has to say about nights there;

“The Variety Photoplays...showed corny girlie films but was better known for being a faggot pick-up place—a place where you could get a handjob/blowjob, with no need of knowing who was giving it to you.”

If Jack Stevenson in Bright Lights Film Journal can be believed, the above description is an understatement. Here’s his unvarnished observation from a 1980’s visit:

Upon entering the auditorium, I saw the movie was playing upside-down. This lasted a good fifteen minutes. Nobody complained or perhaps even noticed....Among the clientele that afternoon were trashy drag queens and what William Burroughs refers to in Junky as “rooming-house flesh;” the old, the infirm, the pallid-complexioned occupants of the neighborhood’s cheap residency hotels. There was a preponderance of fat unshaven duffers dressed in dirty woolen caps and multiple layers of T-shirts and coats, dressed for the middle of winter on this sweltering afternoon. Two old floor fans clanging away up front did nothing to cool the place down.

It was like stepping into a time capsule. I noticed four large globe-like lighting fixtures that had somehow survived the decades. The walls were an unremarkable (patched) plaster, but the ceiling was special, composed of patterned pressed tin. There was a single modest balcony. My main memory was of patrons moving about the theater in a constant bustle and streaming into and out of the toilets oddly situated down front below the screen and surely a distraction for anyone trying to watch the film. The room was filled with the continual rustlings and creakings of people on the move. It was more like a mass happening than a movie screening, and in fact I have no recollection of the film at all. 

When I came into the city for a bowl of borscht and a look-around, I gazed longingly at Variety’s marquee, knowing that if I passed through the doors gender would make me an outlier. Besides, we had run a soft-porn triple feature at the St. George, so I knew what these audiences, gay or straight, did in the dark.  At any rate, I never went inside. The Times observes — with a bit of nostalgia I find suspect —  “People going past the theater, even in the daytime, got a whiff of vintage celluloid, and at night it was intoxicating.” How could I have failed to smell the lovely film stock? Famously flammable, celluloid had actually been out of production since the 1950’s. So much for nostalgia. 

Variety took a brief curtain call as an Off-Broadway theater before it was, sadly, torn down, replaced by the inevitable luxury apartment building. For more, read Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York A.K.A.The Book of Lamentations: A Bitterly Nostalgic Look at a City in the Process of Going Extinct. I love the spirit of this title, nostalgia well placed.

Afterthought: 
Last week’s post was about Deco theaters, aided by the fine book, Popcorn Palaces: The Art Deco Movie Theatre Paintings of Davis Cone. One of Cone’s paintings -- of Variety Photo Plays in the 1970’s -- triggered my memory. Thanks again to Cone...

An unrelated afterthought...
Check out Matt Lambros’ After the Final Curtain for a really moving piece on the former Paramount in Youngstown, Ohio. As you may know, Lambros is a photographer of some considerable chops, who has brilliantly photographed more old movie palaces -- many in alarming states of decrepitude -- than I ever knew existed. 

To my mind, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 (16,410,030 shares traded in a single day) and the decline of the grand movie palace, are twin bubbles that burst at the same time. How could it be otherwise? The palaces were part of the famously roaring 1920‘s, and there was, when it was all over, no roar left, only a long sad moan, as half  of U.S. banks gradually failed, and roughly a third of working people found themselves without a paycheck. A tsunami of sorts, the crash did what all tidal waves do, it altered the features of the landscape. Grandeur was out, along with the great halls and elaborate chandeliers of a happier time. Wall Street had, in the words of Variety, laid “an egg,” and impresarios got it. Very few unabashed palaces opened their doors after the crash. Of course, there were exceptions: a construction project that had been in the works for several years, the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat palace in Staten Island (which I helped to run briefly in the 1970‘s) began its theatrical life two months after the crash, and there were some outright exceptions — palaces begun after the crash — which are notable. Radio City Music Hall (1932) and The Fox Wilshire in Beverly Hills (1930), aka The Saban, come to mind. But by and large, the era of over-the-top was, well, over.

If downsizing was suddenly the thing, with stadium-style neighborhood theaters rising all over the midwest and elsewhere, then, finally, there was a style, with smooth lines and rounded edges. You know it: in Cincinnati, where I grew up, it was the 20th Century, with its rippled front, vertical neon, and curved marquee; in Mattoon Illlinois, it was a little theater called Time, whose facade of smooth linear red and white tiles completes a marquee with a neon wristwatch at its center.  Here in Staten Island, where I’ve spent the better part of my adult life, it’s the Lane -- these days a church -- with Deco neon. It would be almost forty years before the style got a name; meanwhile, lots of folks just called it “modern,”  or “moderne” and some said it was “the Hollywood look.” 

Busby Berkeley, whose movie sets were largely “Deco” confections, made it possible for broke people to escape their empty wallets.  All the lavishness that had once gone into the great palaces went into his movies (Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade for example). A person could -- and did -- get lost in these movies, and the new trim theaters, with their recessed lighting and curved walls were the perfect frames for a Berkeley movie.

Art Deco, Moderne, what have you, is/was the pulse of the 1930’s. In 1929, when Rockefeller Center was on the drawing boards, Roxy Rothafel the great showman and father of — Cathedral of the Motion Picture — the Roxy, signed on to oversee the creation of Radio City Music Hall, an architectural hymn to Deco, if ever there was one. It was the Music Hall, after all, that The New York Daily News compared to “a cosmic tunnel,” a last great movie palace — but in the moderne tradition. An Austrian emigre, Joseph Urban, who designed the New School Auditorium, in NYC, which is noted for its arched proscenium, had been on board for an opera house in Rock Center that never got built. But, some of his ideas ended up in Radio City anyhow, issuing from the hand of a young designer, Donald Deskey. Radio City always reminds me of a great Art Deco train station, Cincinnati’s Union Terminal, which as a child made me dizzy with wonder to stand in. In each case, the curved arch, framed in graduated backlit concentric lines of varying colors is simple and elegant, and soothing. Soothing is what people needed, when so many were out of work.

One of the things that distinguishes Deco from the styles and embellishments that preceded it is the materials it takes in. A nickel/copper alloy that came into play in 1906, Monel, was used for door handles, and even whole doors, despite the expense. Monel has long-lasting qualities (resists corrosion) and these days shows up in aerospace and in the guitar strings of certain rock musicians. In the twenties and thirties, it gave Deco that polished look. Vitrolite, aka Pigmented Structural Glass, was another material that came of age at the turn of the 20th Century. You’ve seen this: black structural glass was sometimes silvered to give it a reflective finish. Production of this material has all but disappeared. Although its compressive strength is 40 percent greater than marble, the annealing (cooling) process takes three to five days. Other typical Deco materials include: mica, chrome, stucco, aluminum,  steel, concrete, smooth-faced stone, Terracotta and glass blocks. Love those glass blocks, or glass bricks, as they’re sometimes called...

Now for some Deco theaters you ought to check out.  Just as Radio City opened after (in spite of?) the great crash, the Oakland Paramount, 3,476 seats extended the age of the movie palace by just a few years, opening in 1931. Imperiled as so many movie palaces were in the sixties and seventies (including my own St. George), the Paramount was rescued by the Oakland Symphony Orchestra, refurbished, and is alive and well today.

The Deco style sometimes features graduated shapes, reminiscent of wedding cakes. One such is The Wink in Dalton Georgia, which appears to have a wedding cake on its marquee. J.H.W. Wink, a local, who began construction of the theater in 1941, died before its completion and is said to be buried somewhere on the premises. The theater, some say, is haunted. If true, this means his ghost is attending services of Rock Bridge CC, a Kingdom Seekers church that occupies the theater. For additional Wink  lore, here’s a remark from the comments column of that theater’s Cinema Treasures entry:

My Grandfather ran this theater in Dalton from 1941 to 1948. It was under the management of Loews. He moved all over Georgia running their theaters, but started in Dalton at the Wink. 

I know some actors that graced the building, as they were told...to me by my Grandfather, my Grandmother (who worked at the ticket booth) and my mother who spent her after-school days there. 

I am glad to know it still stands and has been repaired.
 
Now there’s a serious theater family.
 
The Senator, in Baltimore, Md., is a veritable glossary of Deco styles and materials. The rippling verticals of the building’s facade feature streams of red glass blocks, alternating with streams of green, and a half-round marquee.  

For a taste of what fine old movie houses go through to survive nowadays, check out the Senator’s Cinema Treasures entry. The theater is apparently up and running, since it lists showings for today of The Post, Three Billboards...and Finest Hour. Here's to Baltimore for keeping this treasure.

Last week, I wrote about free-standing Box Offices, with a special nod in the direction of a favorite old theater of  mine in Cincinnati, where I grew up, the Mt. Lookout. It strikes me now that the theater’s afore-mentioned half-moon shaped doors (another Deco feature) are what led me to want to write about Deco style in theaters in the first place. The County Theatre in Doylestown, Pa., seems like a great place to end this Deco journey. It has half-moon shaped doors too!  And a marvelous success story, so great that its parent company, with the admirable name of Renew Theaters Inc., took over several other Philly-centric theaters, including one I visit periodically when I’m in the City of Brotherly Love, the Ambler. One of my early posts features it: take a peek!
 
Afterthought:  I’ve been weaving a semi-deliberate daisy-chain in the last several blog posts. Two weeks ago I wrote about box office lingo (boffo socko and that kind of thing), which made me think about box offices, so a week ago I wrote about those. Then, because the box office of the theater I was fixating on happened to be Deco, with half-moon-shaped windows in its doors, I thought about Art Deco theaters in general, that whole style.

Coincidentally, this week my husband gave me a fascinating book that features photo-realistic paintings of Art Deco theaters, Popcorn Palaces: The Art Deco Movie Theatre Paintings of Davis Cone. A hat-tip to the authors of that outstanding book, Michael D. Kinerk and Dennis W. Wilhelm, and to Cone himself, a movie-theater zealot if ever there was one. His roots seem to lead to such painters as John Baeder, and Richard Estes and the rest of that gang, with a distant nod to Edward Hopper.

​Learning as I go!

In 1956, my teenaged sister, the glamor-puss of the family, worked after school at a local movie house, the Mt. Lookout, in Cincinnati where I grew up. She sat in a free-standing Deco box office symmetrically placed between two sets of half-moon doors, putting on her lipstick, and waiting to shove another ticket across the marble sill to anyone, friend or stranger, who showed up. Eight years old at the time, I tagged along as often as I could, lucky to cadge free popcorn and free admission to Earth Versus the Flying Saucers or Moby Dick, or whatever happened to be on-screen. I had my pick of any of the 750 seats in the small-scale auditorium. Choosing to sit wherever I wanted helped me feel very grown up; more importantly, I could have as much popcorn — Good ‘n Plenties, whatever — as I wanted. But what I loved most was to visit my sister in the box office.

It was really a box! Cris sat inside, like the gypsy mannequin in the fortune-telling machine at Coney Island. To this day, free-standing box offices are magnetic to me, they’re irresistible, like the clam on a just-opened shell,  or the ring in a fancy jeweler’s satin-lined coffer, or that little ballerina in a hand-carved music box from Italy. The box office at the movie palace I briefly ran in Staten Island, after I’d grown up and moved to New York, was not free-standing, and a good thing too. Given the dicey nature of our tough urban streets in 1976, it was just as well that our teller’s cage-style box office was inside the lobby of the St. George Theatre. But that didn’t keep me from thinking about my sister at the Mt. Lookout.

The term “box office” grew out of the era that preceded Nickelodeons, when any storefront could become a “theater.” With a sheet on the back wall of a bare room, and chairs, often as not, borrowed from elsewhere, early theater owners were in business. A simple box standing in the doorway, to sell and collect tickets completed the start-up. The more successful a little theater became, the more permanent the box, which grew, eventually, large enough to hold at least one employee. As the great movie palaces vied to attract multitudes, that box in the doorway got fancier still, part of the dream of escape.

Palaces came in all shapes and sizes, but all were designed to start the movie-going fantasy well before the viewer had even paid for a ticket. On the subject of S. Charles Lee’s Fremont Theatre in San Luis Obispo, Maggie Valentine observes, “...all the lines of the lobby, from the [free-standing] box office and the marble terrazzo to the undulating side walls containing the poster cases, coordinate to pull the customer toward the entry” ( p. 98). The free-standing box office was an intentional clam-shell, with Venus at its core! S. Charles Lee himself admitted that one of his architectural goals in designing free-standing box offices had been to flatter the attendant. Here’s Valentine again, pursuing the theme of theater visibility, “Rippling plaster ‘lids’ resembling the caricatured marcelled hair of leading men sat atop glass walls, which were etched with flowers, the name of the theatre, or the pattern of the terrazzo. The base was polished aluminum, stainless steel, bronze, or marble. The entry doors echoed these motifs with circular windows, etched glass, or polished bronze.” (p 102).

Ah, those circular windows!  The Mt. Lookout had them, even in the Cincinnati suburbs: two half-moons of glass meeting to form a pair of doors to the left and right of my sister’s magic showcase.

So here’s to (fancy) portals of commerce in cities and towns all over the world: the Crest Theatre in Fresno whose box office resembles a cake with royal icing, the glass-brick and chrome box office of the Surf Theatre in Ocean City, New Jersey, the Ohio Theatre in Columbus, whose pagoda-like box office could qualify as an elaborate “tiny house.”

That’s what probably attracted me in the first place, to my sister’s Art Moderne single room on a Mt. Lookout sidewalk. I was after all a little girl, and wasn’t it, really just a doll house? My sister, the living doll, dwelt inside. 

Afterthought: My mother didn’t approve of Cris’s theater job, partly because, gorgeous as my sister was, her study habits were abysmal. Our mother also thought the theater a little seedy; but had she known! Years after Mother died, Cris confessed to me that on New Year’s Eve the year she worked at the Mt. Lookout, she’d been sitting in the glass booth when a car careened suddenly around the corner on two wheels spitting out a single bullet, which penetrated the glass just above her head. What a glamorous corpse she might have made...!

A decade and a half later, I sat behind the bars of our (interior) box office at the St. George Theatre, wishing I could just let a few kids slide by for free, the way my sister had waved me through. But the 35-cent free ticket of my childhood was, by then, ninety cents, and we needed every penny.