Serendipity is a wonderful friend to writers (Sarah N. Dipity I sometimes call her). I've been traveling & am not entirely off the road yet, so here are some additional thoughts on last week's post, which happened to use a poster from the old Savoy Theatre in San Diego, an original Vaudeville house. I was interested to learn, from a friend with roots in San Diego, that the Savoy (corner of 3rd and C Streets) was a gem of a  house in its day, with the rare distinction, in California, of having resisted the advent of motion pictures almost entirely. The 1408-seat Savoy apparently never had a permanently-installed movie screen, though it did entertain a flirtation with the Pantages organization, featuring  movies twice daily for a brief time, on some kind of temporary reflective surface. Having opened in 1919, it closed in 1940, a casualty, at least in part, of Vaudeville's demise. Other live performance houses that hopped on the moving-picture bandwagon in the twenties and thirties did survive, and, in a kind of moebius twist, have made the transition back to live performance again, including the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, where I spent the memorable year of 1976 as a movie exhibitor. Sad, then, that the Savoy remained so stubbornly uncinematic, also odd --and ironic -- that by equipping itself to show movies, it might have remained standing, after all -- to become once again a live theater.  My friend tells me the San Diego Civic Theater, which occupies the Savoy's old street corner, is opulent but sterile, the kind of architecture you find in convention centers. Oh well. Better than a parking lot, I guess.

My webmaster was called suddenly out of town, so, alas, no links for the above text, which I'm thinking of as an afterthought on the topic of Vaudeville.  We'll be returning to a normal format next week.Thanks for your patience -- and your readership.

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 “Film and Vaudeville Cathedral Ranks as Very Best in the City,” raved The Staten Island Advance about this island’s new theater, The St. George, on Tuesday, December 3, 1929, the day before opening night. This and other brittle press clippings in a pile on a desk in the dusty sign room, entertained me, a partner in running the St. George in 1976, the last year of its career as a movie palace. We were desperate, we were broke. How we kept going for almost a complete year, I can’t, from the vantage point of 2018, fathom. A bottomless well of youthful energy had something to do with it. On certain afternoons when I had no money to pay anybody and little heart for much else, I hung out in the sign room, looking through the clippings. Local pride had generated the above headline, no doubt, but it wasn’t as far from the truth as you might imagine. In the last month of the last year of the 1920‘s, Eugene De Rosa’s elegant new Spanish Baroque theater offered many things, including unimpeded sight-lines, thanks to a then-rare cantilevered balcony. Having sat behind a pillar in Carnegie Hall on at least one occasion, I love this aspect of the theater, understanding just how limiting “limited sight lines”can be.

The orchestra pit, on that first Wednesday in 1929, had held Arnold Johnson and his orchestra from “The Majestic Theater of the Air.” Blossom Seeley, “Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” took the stage, and the first of what would be thousands of movies, So This Is College, offered first-nighters the novelty of sound.

By 1929, Vaudeville, for which the St. George had been built, was more a decorative add-on than a reason for audiences to buy tickets. Song and dance teams, acrobats, singers, animal trainers and the like who traveled on the remaining circuits, were sad figures by the early thirties. On December 26, 1933, an article headlined, “Actors Robbed at St. George.” told of a robbery “...committed between 9 and 10 P.M., while...Vaudeville was in progress.” Performers’ wallets, handbags and jewelry were apparently never recovered. It was likely a lean haul for the thief. The following year, 1934, saw the end of live shows altogether. The theater changed hands, having come close to bankrupting its original owners. The house Wurlitzer, an organ of some stature, entertained patrons for one year beyond the departure of live performers, then went dormant, waiting a half century to be sold off, ending up local sources say, in a pizza parlor in Texas.

In the forties, fifties and beyond, the St. George’s stage was never entirely vacant. Actors sold war bonds, ambitious managers gave away free dishes on “dish night,” and The Great Blackstone floated a mysterious unattached light bulb through a hoop. Elements of the Metropolitan Opera Chorus took the stage in the fifties, according to some clippings and a sign I found: Four Operas Three Dollars. But, mid-twentieth century, movies gave the theater its livelihood, providing a place for mothers to drop their children, with money for soda, candy and popcorn. Later on, for those same growing children, it provided a balcony, and privacy with a hot date — a nest in the dark from which to watch anything and everything on a giant screen from B movies and newsreels to cartoons and The Three Stooges — before, the narrow telescope of TV fractured the waking dream of “the movies.”

Just below the rim of the stage, the orchestra pit, by 1976, was a sad affair. Arnold Johnson, the orchestra leader on opening night, could hardly have raised his baton in such a place. It was a pit of another kind entirely, smelling of aged urine. You could get a whiff if you stood at the central arc of the boards, just past the footlights. When nobody was around, I’d climb the stairs to the stage and look out on all that vacancy.  Such was the life of a rookie theater operator in 1976. 

There is a happy ending, perhaps not for the movies, but for the St. George — and other surviving 1920‘s palaces. As you may know if you’re a reader of this blog, the St. George was saved by “Mrs. Rosemary,” a local dance teacher who literally mortgaged her house to buy the property. The decades of theater demolition, from 1960, when Rothafel’s Roxy in Manhattan fell and (in ’62) the Paramount in L.A. became a parking lot, through the seventies, eighties and nineties, reduced thousands of palaces to rubble. Yet many more weathered that period, in most cases saved by individuals or passionate local groups. The surviving theaters have mostly traded in their single movie screens and turned once again to their origins in Vaudeville. At the United Palace of Cultural Arts in upper Manhattan, still a home to the Reverend Ike’s congregation, which saved this former Wonder Theater from demolition, a circle -- of African drums on stage -- testifies to the theater's more recent career as a performance space. The Garde, in New London, Ct., has become “The Community’s Parlor,” in the words of Steven Sigel, saved first by a local entrepreneur who owned a paper box company, then by a citzen-led non-profit.  
        
Has Vaudeville returned? Well, almost. For one thing, Classic Rock has entered its twilight phase, with many original talents and their fans still more or less standing. And in this age of niche audiences, Doo-Wop one night followed by Rap the next hardly seems incongruous. Of course, local performance needs a home: in Jacksonville, last summer, I walked into the Florida where a dance school not unlike Mrs. Rosemary’s, was having its yearly fundraiser, replete with ballerinas as snow-flakes (odd in the Florida heat). Finally, a generation or more of performers seem to hark back to their great grandparents, who played the Orpheum Circuit. To quote Scotty Morris of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, now in its 25th year of touring, with over 2800 appearances under its belt, “The money is in performance.” (Apparently, what an individual band member makes from services like Spotify is not enough for more than a week’s worth of coffee). We heard BBVD at the St. George, same place we heard K.D. Lang bring down the house with “Hallelujah.”  And Tony Bennett, still on the road after ninety-one birthdays. I’m glad to think of the St. George’s backstage dressing rooms — strewn as they were in ’76 with rubble — full these days of performers’ gear. And no robbers.

Like most Americans, I’m a transplant, an Ohioan who’s lived in NYC for over forty years. I happen to be driving the better-than-six-hundred miles back “home” tomorrow (why do I still call Cincinnati home? It’s mysterious...). Anyhow, a lot has changed since I left, including, in that darkest of movie-palace years, 1977, the demolition of my favorite childhood theater, The RKO Albee. As a five-year-old I saw Three Coins in the Fountain there (would I grow up to marry a prince and live in Rome?). The Wizard of Oz, GWTW — I saw them first at the Albee. Then Cleopatra and The Sound of Music. I watched the sixties pass, from Alfie to Barbarella, on the theater’s pristine screen. Then I left and grew up. I wish I could stop by the Albee on Wednesday, but lacking a time machine, I’ll settle for words: 

Everyone has a great love, some have two. So it has been for me, with movie palaces.  
 
In 1976, while we were trying to save the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, my original great theater love back home in Cincinnati, the RKO Albee, was already flashlight-dark and silent, its Wurlitzer organ removed, cobwebs forming on the cobwebs that shrouded its enormous crystal chandelier. All through my childhood, it had been the palace of palaces. Built by Lamb, it was lavish, with thirty-five hundred seats, a 40 x 70 Czech Maffersdorf carpet, lamps from John Jacob Astor’s Fifth Avenue Mansion in New York, and...and. Before it was built, in 1926, The Cincinnati Times Star heralded its arrival, like the birth of some important prince:
 
“...it is enough to say that it will be an Albee theater. That is, it will have all the magnificent and artistic beauty of the Albee theaters in Brooklyn and Cleveland, which are distinctive as the finest theatrical structures in the world. The realty was taken over on a basis of nearly $2,000,000, so the total investment will be $3,500,000, and Cincinnati will have the finest moving picture house in the world.
 
Though the theater will be used, for some time as least, for the showing of Greater Moving Pictures, it will have a full stage with complete equipment, all necessary dressing rooms and the same marvelous backstage arrangement, which exists at present only in the two Albee theaters already built.”
 
Cincinnati’s Albee opened on Christmas Eve in 1927, its first movie the silent Get Your Man! starring Clara Bow. For fifty years, the Albee — and not necessarily whatever movie was showing there — was what Cincinnatians put on silk stockings and Beau Brummel ties to see. I was lucky to be amongst the last generation to watch two layers of curtain — one brocade, the other a sheer scrim — part over every event, to know tuxedoed ushers, and to visit a ladies room with full-length mahogany mirrors.
 
Phil Lind, who used to work as an usher, recalls, “It was a fun job.... Sometimes we would stand around and talk, and other times we would explore the theater.  We went from the roof to the basement....” (which apparently included underground passageways to Wiggins — the bar next door — and the Gibson Hotel, where Vaudeville actors used to stay).  
 
But every beginning has its end. Here is a description of what some local citizens had to say, while still others fought to save the palace from the wrecker’s ball, in 1977:  
 
...the Save the Albee Committee was formed, but it had little effect. City manager [of the time] E. Robert Turner, flatly stated that the Albee could not be preserved ‘...at the expense of tasteful and decent development’ around Fountain Square. The city planning director echoed a similar sentiment, noting that under no circumstance was the Albee worth saving.  ‘We have movie theaters downtown, and entertainment facilities nearby for music, opera, drama and dance. What do we need another one for?
 
In 1977, the entire block...was demolished for Fountain Square South [a project] that consisted of a Westin [hotel] and a Firstar Bank... 
 
To quote Joni MItchell, “They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.”
 
Treasures from the Albee remain. Its organ, wisely purchased by the Ohio chapter of The American Theater Organ Society, sheltered for many years at a small local hall (The Emery Theater), now itself facing possible demolition. It spent about a decade in storage, emerging in 2009 to a safe, and permanent home in the ballroom of Cincinnati’s Music Hall. 
 
As Joseph Hollman, Ohio Valley chapter president of the ATOS, pointed out:
Too many pipe organs were sold as parts and the organ broken up for sale, eliminating that organ’s originality.  Others were torn down with the theaters they were housed in...  
 
Anyone who read my blog post on the whereabouts of what is left of the St. George Theatre’s fine old Wurlitzer will not miss the irony. 
 
In my life, it is a remarkable coincidence that we lost our lease on the St. George Theatre in 1977, the year the Albee was torn down. The St. George would remain shuttered for decades, narrowly dodging the Albee’s fate.
 
Beyond the Albee’s rescued Wurlitzer, other parts — including the theater’s ticket booth — survive in Music Hall’s ballroom — a pilgrimage I need to make. A pair of magnificent bronze doors graces the Ohio Theater in Columbus, a few hours’ drive north. But the theater’s grand entryway, a classical arch of some distinction, didn’t fare as well. In 1977 it was fitted out to adorn the front of the Sabin Convention Center. In 2006 a renovation transformed that unremarkable building into the Duke Energy Center. Writing in 2011, The Cincinnati Enquirer (Jim Rohrer) remarked that the theater’s arch seemed  "plastered on a modern building of no apparent style...." He wondered if this was “... any way to treat a grand old lady?"  
 
Indeed. Few passersby notice the arch, or know what wonders once lay beyond it. So it goes with the old palaces, the ones that remain, through accident or the prudence of local activists — or — as with the St. George — great financial risk of a single individual.
 
The less-fortunate theaters are remembered by grown-up (and grown old) children who remember seeing From Here to Eternity or Olivier's Henry the Fifth or Three Coins in a Fountain under an elaborate and sheltering dome.   

Afterthought: Nobody knows how to spell the name of my home town, except people who grew up there; it’s one of the random advantages of being a Cincinnatian. Another advantage, if you also happened to grow up in the nineteen fifties or before, is the ringing of the RKO Albee’s 31-rank, 2000-pipe Wurlitzer organ in the dim recesses of your memory. 

10:30 on a weekday night at the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, 1976. The 9:30 showing of Cooley High was heading into its final reel. To save money, my husband (and partner in our 2,672-seat movie palace enterprise) had told Diane, on concession , to close down and head for home. There was nobody in the box office and, alas, there were scant patrons in the auditorium; Leroy stood guard at the usher’s ticket station. 

Leroy was short and slender, but he styled himself big. Sporting his signature strut (modeled on the boxer Mike Tyson), he made his way toward Dean. “...Woman at the door wants a hotdog, wants two actually an’ a small corn...I told her the movie’s almost over, but she don’t care. Says all she wants is dinner. Candy stand closed, right?”

The stand was more or less functional, the coffee and popcorn still warm. “No problem, let her come on in,” Dean replied. He’d fix up the dogs and corn himself.

This kind of thing happened all the time in a neighborhood where dinner and a movie could translate into just dinner, if we were willing. Whole families sometimes came in and asked to order food for take-out. We did have the highest per capita stand in all five boroughs, which is to say our average patron spent a buck fifty on a ticket and about the same on food. That’s a lot when you consider that a Big Mac in 1976 cost 65 cents. The national average on concession per movie patron was just under 90 cents. Those who couldn’t afford the movie just asked if they could buy dinner. The woman in question became a regular, always showing up towards the end of the last showing, as if to say, “All I want is food.” Who could blame her? Sabrett’s all beef ball-park hotdogs on homemade Italian rolls that had arrived fresh that morning, dijon mustard. Fresh popped corn with clarified butter, fresh coffee, and, if you could afford dessert, Haagen-Daaz ice cream, first of its kind in NYC, delivered weekly by a skinny guy in a station wagon.

Then there was the jazz dude, a retired side-man who used to show up in spangled (sequin) suits, each with a matching hat. I assumed these were his show outfits: one in Kelly green, one purple, one scarlet, one gold, one silver. He paid for the movie, but never sat down, ordering himself a hot dog (“yellow dog” he called it — with mustard) and a small Coke. Then he stationed himself just outside the concession stand, where, through the glass, he could see — but not hear — the movie.

Paullie, whose regular beat was concession, studied the dude’s speech patterns and continuous rolling monologue, till he could repeat it exactly. “I had the wimmins’, lots an’ lotsa wimmens...” A list would ensue including but not limited to Shirley, Georgia, Geneva, and Lorraine. “He really makes that hot dog last,” Paullie reported one night. “Eighty bites, on average!” A concessionaire has to keep alert somehow...  

I was selling tickets one June night, when I heard a woman’s voice and thought I might have encountered a ghost; no one appeared to be standing there. Then a head peaked over the edge of the marble box office sill, and I realized that a tiny old woman, leaning for support on a market cart, and almost invisible, thanks to her height, was trying to get my attention. Her name, I would later learn, was Dr. Oppenheim. She lived in an apartment right around the corner, and I became quite friendly with her over a period of several months. But that night we had yet to introduce ourselves. “I really only want one of your famous hot dogs!” she exclaimed. “Is that alright?”

“Of course!” I said, then waved her past Leroy, watching her shuffle slowly behind the market cart, a make-shift version of a wheeled walker. She emerged a few minutes later with her hot dog, and stopped again in front of my ticket window.

“Terrific!” she said. “People are talking about these out on the street, and I figured I don’t need to sit through The Dragon Dies Hard to get one.” So began a wonderful dialogue between the two of us, which lasted deep into the fall of that year. She was a retired family doctor, living alone, frail, but mentally vigorous, a lover of poetry, opera, and philosophy. Two of these three are passions of mine.

A little after Dr. Oppenheim stopped coming, driven away, I suspected, by the chill winds of November, we tried to put dinner and a movie together, under the guise of a dinner/movie special. You could clip our ad from the local paper and, for $4.95 including admission, you could choose from a pre-fix menu at a struggling local  restaurant just opened down the street. The menu included a credible burger, greasy fries and other items, some less disappointing than others. Our partnership was brief — Chubby went out of business after Thanksgiving. Anyhow what were we thinking?  Every burger somebody bought from him was a hot dog we wouldn’t sell at our high per-capita stand. 

What drove me to these recollections?  Last night, Dean and I went out to Alamo Draft House in Brooklyn for dinner and a movie. I’ve been holding off going to dinner and a movie as combined events, though NYC is crawling with opportunities (Metrograph, Nitehawk). Even though, forty-plus years ago, with our high-end concession stand, we more or less pioneered the concept of dinner and a movie under one roof at the St. George, I’m not used to major comestibles (a burger in my case) including wine, while sitting in a recliner watching the movie screen. Feels a little too much like home. 

It was a good burger and an excellent movie (don’t miss it, RBG, about the venerable Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg), but my mind strayed momentarily to maintenance. If Coke syrup and popcorn are hard to clean up after, what’s it like to keep a dinner movie theater clean? 

The recliner made me reflect that Dr. Oppenheim might have been lured into the dark after all, to watch a Bruce Lee double feature, if we could have offered her what in those days would have been a Barcalounger, to kick back in. Imagine them all: the good doctor lounging with her hot dog, the jazzman propped up beside her in his spangled suit, and the lady from the street, if she could only have afforded the price of a ticket and dinner. 

Meanwhile, I think I agree with Charles Cohen, the owner of the newly-refurbished Quad Cinema in Manhattan. “We considered dine-in for about a minute, but to me, a first class moviegoing experience is not one where the person next to you is eating a steak,” he reflected. Gotcha. 

Afterthought: Returning to the subject of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, her tastes, at least for opera, remind me a lot of Dr. Oppenheim’s, who was Ginsburg’s age almost a half a century ago. Wonder if  (the notorious) RBG likes hotdogs?

Afterthought 2: One of the cleverest front lobby marketing strategies I’ve seen in a long while is a Ruth Bader Ginsburg cardboard prop-up of a long black gown with lace collar at the top. Behind it is a step on which an admirer of the Justice can stand, placing her/his head in the slot above the collar for a photo-op.

Coming soon...to a theater near you! When out to the movies was where you went  at least once a week, a former actor named Thaddeus Suski coined this catchphrase —  according to my husband and fellow ex-movie-theater-operator. Dean ought to know; his first boss was Thaddeus’s brother. The string of seven words did well for Thaddeus, who built a marketing business on the money he made every time a movie trailer ran those seven words, and retired to Santa Barbara a wealthy man. Phrase-making can be a lucrative profession; think Don LaFontaine, who, long after Thaddeus Suski died, proclaimed “in a world...” at the beginning of more than 5,000 movie trailers. LaFontaine got rich as well, and famous — in a world of voice-over. BTW, the movie In a World features a fictionalized LaFontaine. An honorable profession, voice-over: the man who introduced Pall Mall Cigarettes on radio and television retired on the catchphrase “...and they are mild,” but that’s another story. 

Coming Soon! An entire roomful of signs bearing this and other hopeful bywords and useful cliches existed on the mezzanine of the movie palace I was involved, with Dean, in running in 1976, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island. The movie exhibition business in those days needed a sign room to contain them all: Starts Wednesday, Starts Thursday, Starts Friday, New Release! Double Feature! and my favorite, a tasseled banner, Sneak Preview Tonite! It’s hard to think of our time at the theater without reliving the load-in, when the film canisters arrived, the marquee letters went up, and one or another of these plastic or cardboard showcards bearing a Coming Soon variation was replaced in the poster case by the inevitable Now Playing.

It was a time when people came out of their houses and apartments to sit together in a communal trance, in an auditorium large enough to rival Lascaux or the Luray Caverns, and watch Linda Blair’s head swivel three hundred and sixty degrees on her body — and, for a moment, believe it!  That’s what happens with good storytelling/ moviemaking. It’s called “willing suspension of disbelief.” The poet S.T. Coleridge came up with it, back in 1817, and it more or less means that I throw logic and caution to the winds, in order to enjoy an obvious piece of fiction. Nobody could enjoy a magic show without pretending that the assistant really is sawed in two, and there’s that novel you wish wouldn’t end. The best demonstration of the fact that willing suspension works at the movies is that an audience watching Casablanca,most of whom are not completely colorblind, are in a world (to borrow LaFontaine’s cliché) that is entirely black and white. I’m happy when Dorothy lands in Oz, and the world blossoms into Technicolor (the 3-strip color process no less, in its first iteration), but at the end, I wake with her in black and white, safe at home in Kansas, and I’m still in the movie’s dream.

Perhaps my happiest moments at the St. George — talk about being in a world — involved movies so completely satisfying that I was able to forget the overdrawn checkbook I’d left back in my office under the stairs. There was Taxi Driver and its gleaming mean streets of Times Square, that I knew so well having walked through them, desperate myself. There was The Man Who Would Be King (when Sean Connery/(Danny) humming “The Minstrel Boy,” strides to the middle of a rope bridge he knows will soon be cut down, pitching him into a Himalayan chasm). Since the St. George Theatre, in its twilight as a cinema, was itself a kind of chasm for us, its temporary occupants, I can see why this is one of the only movies I watched from beginning to end, my legs tucked up in a cozy seat in the lower balcony. 

I watched The Post two nights ago — I’m ashamed to say I watched it on i-Tunes, but then it belongs to last year’s Oscar picks, and somehow slipped through my cinema fingers in its year. Now you can’t find it in a theater. It’s a riveting movie, and despite the lack of fellow dreamers in the dark and fresh-popped corn, I went to sleep afterwards in a world of dial phones and manual typewriters. The movie awakened in me the desire to watch All the President’s Men again, which, I’m happy to say, we showed on the St. George Theatre’s bigger-than-life grape-soda-stained screen in the year of its release, 1976. 

I’m a little worried about the line between fiction and non-, these days. Are we getting our willing-suspension fix often enough in a world that’s “post-truth,” whatever that actually means?  Movie theater attendance in the US and Canada in 2017 fell to its lowest point since at least 1992, Bloomberg reports. Box Office Mojo estimates around 1.24 billion tickets were sold, a drop off of 5.8 percent from the previous year. Meanwhile get a load of this: “Oculus VR is developing an immersive theater experience to debut next year that will feature real-world actors who perform in virtual reality using motion capture.” 

How can we tell what to suspend, when there isn’t any difference between belief and disbelief?   What's coming soon...or next?