
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, April 28, 1990                   TAG: 9004300210
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IN DARK, ANY THEATER WILL DO

TUESDAY afternoon, in a fit of April angst, I threw up my hands and went to the movies. There I sat in the dark, pretending I was alone, pretending I was in a different world and in a different time. Pretending, in short, I was the hero of a meaningful life with a clear beginning, middle and end.

I've met people who say they spent the happiest hours of their childhoods snuggled into movie theaters. Their parents gave them a quarter and dropped them off at the door. Once inside, they sat with paper sacks of popcorn propped on their knees through two or three runs of the Saturday morning movie and cartoon.

These people grew up in towns where once they'd learned to look both ways before crossing the street, they could walk to the movies alone; towns where ticket booths were still manned by odd, grumpy women who asked "Does your mother know where you are?", and whose husbands were somewhere upstairs in the dark trying to fix the projector.

There was a movie house in Fincastle when I was a girl, but it had long been closed down. By the time I was old enough to walk up the street alone, it had dissolved into a spooky unpainted building, half a block long, with weedy vines creeping up its front steps. Maybe those steps had once been painted yellow. Maybe there were still scraps of posters peeling off the marquees. Maybe there was a great padlock keeping the front doors closed. I only know the building itself still stood because I asked Mama what it had been. Imagine, I thought, when she told me; the movies right here in Fincastle!

We had to drive to Roanoke to see movies, and that was quite a trip. Mostly we went to the Lee on Williamson Road, which was still a respectable, if small, family theater, and the closest to us. We saw the Walt Disney movies there. We also saw a series of movies that must have been advertised as "Ladies' Matinees": "Little Women" and a string of Jeannette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy operettas. To this day my brother pales at the mention of those operettas, even though he couldn't have been 3 years old when Mama dragged him along.

Farther away were the Jefferson, the American and the Grandin. But a trip to any was a major outing. We waited until our parents could drive us, or we didn't see movies at all. And nearly every day I walked by that abandoned theater in Fincastle, wondering what it must be like to be able, at almost any time, to walk up to the ticket window myself and slip into another world.

These days I go to the movies often, usually matinees. It's still a drive, but it doesn't seem so much an undertaking when everything I do requires a drive anymore. The mall theaters that show matinees are clean and tiny and just alike: chilly and antiseptic. But once the lights are down, if the house is empty enough (and it often is at matinees), I pretend I've just strolled into Fincastle's theater with its steep wooden floor and murals on the walls and horsehair stuffed in the seat. I pretend I'm in a different time and place, before I even knew the word "angst," and free as only a child knows how to be free.

Of course, I never saw the inside of Fincastle's theater and my imaginings of that particular "dream factory" are surely more resplendant than any reality. The movies were probably less than second-rate, surely not first-run. Certainly the seating was segregated and the air always full of smoke. But if it had been operating when I was a girl, I would have been able to walk into it on my own.

Sometime before I finished elementary school, the old theater was torn down. The lot on which it stood still looks empty to me.

by CNB