RSS feed links
Hijack-proof forms. Surveys. List building.
Solid, safe website tools.
Whatever your need, Will Bontrager builds powerful software solutions.
Solid, safe website tools.
Whatever your need, Will Bontrager builds powerful software solutions.
RSS feed links
Blog Article Categories |
(Get Attention Ticker for your web site)
My First Real Movie In a Real Movie TheatreBy Will Bontrager This is a little something about me. When I was growing up, we didn't celebrate New Years. The timing was noted, just not celebrated. The only to-do was when Dad swapped the calendars. The whole family followed him around the house while he did it. There was a calendar on a kitchen wall. There was one on a living room wall. And there was a calendar for each bedroom wall, both upstairs and down. We didn't have an inside bathroom, or it would have had a calendar, too, I'm sure. Because the outhouse did. At each calendar, except for the one in the outhouse, Dad would say, "Off with the old. On with the new." (That's an approximate translation.) We would all smile and nod. Then follow him to the next one. Dad never did say so, but I believe he skipped the outhouse because the family wouldn't all fit in there. It was a 2-seater but even so, it was too small to squeeze in all 8 of us and still give Dad enough elbow room to change the calendar. The first movie I ever saw in a movie theatre was on a New Year's Eve when I was 17, a midnight showing of Gone With the Wind. Let me back up a bit and mention that I grew up Amish. (Some of you might not know about the Amish. It's a religious group that shuns modern conveniences. Same with movies and still pictures. (Calendars are a necessity. If they come with pictures, well, what can one do?) Anyway, my brother and I had run away from home the previous summer in order to go to high school. We became proficient at changing channels on the television, and tuning the radio. And we did some correspondence high school courses to catch up with the kids in our age group. But we had never seen a real movie in a real movie theatre. There was so much else to do. Like learning to ride a bicycle, for example. My brother got the hang of it before I did. And he also had the first accident. He was riding on the sidewalk in that little town of Oelwein, Iowa, coasting his bicycle on a slight downgrade, enjoying the ride, when he spotted a young lady walking on the sidewalk across the street. Now, this was the time when mini-skirts were in vogue. It may have been the very year when they were at their highest point, just before hemlines started coming back down. My brother was 16. The bicycle kept on coasting down the sidewalk. And Harvey kept on watching the young lady — — until the bicycle veered into a stop sign. To get back on the track of this narrative, my first real movie in a real movie theatre was also my first New Year's Eve away from the familiar Amish home. The people who let my brother and I stay at their house and helped us along in the world we found ourselves in, had accepted an invitation to attend a New Year's party of some kind. There would be alcohol and, being young and not fully mature, my brother and I, or at least I, wouldn't know when to quit and would, in all likelihood, do something stupid and embarrass our benefactors. So they sent us off to the movies. From my seat near the front of the theatre, the screen filled my whole vision. I found myself participating in the action, like I was living it along with them. My awareness of my physical surroundings diminished, disappeared. Only the movie existed. Right in the middle of a scene with pumping adrenal, the movie was interrupted with a picture of fireworks going off and champagne bottles popping and loud music and people cheering. It was a yank back to reality. I was upset. Why would they interrupt a movie like that! I'm afraid I complained loudly to my seatmates, loud enough and inappropriate enough that word was relayed to our benefactors. It was explained to me, the next day, that non-Amish people celebrate New Years, and that the movie was interrupted when it was because that was the moment the calendar turned. This was a new idea, that the ending of one year and the beginning of another was a reason for celebration. The idea took root. It grew. And grew — until the symbolic moving of one year to another has become my favorite celebration.
Let us celebrate! December 31, 2005 Please note: Articles on this website are presented "as is". However - If you have a question about a CGI script, HTML, CSS, PHP, or JavaScript
Rate this blog post.
No page reload! |
|
© 1998-2001 William and Mari Bontrager |
|