MARCH 17, 2021 – Often I play a mind game involving conversations with people of my past, including myself; past—as opposed to future—is only natural, given that “my movie,” you might say, is well past intermission.
Speaking of “intermission,” I remember clearly my introduction to the word. The occasion was my eighth birthday party, or rather, a pre-party field trip to the Anoka Theater on the other side of town. Once all my friends had gathered at our house, my parents ferried us to the movie.
I don’t know whose bright idea it was to go to the movie for my birthday. In other words, it was probably my idea. As a kid growing up in the Halloween Capital of the World, you didn’t have a lot of party entertainment possibilities—apart from Halloween itself.
There was nothing wrong with the concept of taking my birthday crowd to a movie, except one minor detail: the movie playing that week wasn’t exactly a Disney production. Ironically, to a kid going into third grade, the name of the movie—El Cid—looked and sounded a lot like “El Kid.” What’s a tad weird is that my parents didn’t try talking me out of the movie. Surely, they’d heard lots about the marathon, epic film starring Charlton Heston in the title role and Sophia Loren as El Cid’s wife. Maybe my parents figured that the interminable movie would vastly reduce the time they’d need to supervise a crowd of second-going-on-third-graders at our house.
In any event, at the appointed hour, we got dropped off at the theater at the end of Main Street. With money Mother had given me, I bought popcorn, Dots, Red Hots, Pom Poms, and Milk Duds for my crowd. The newsreel, cartoons, and movie previews gave us ample time to inhale our goodies before the main feature.
I couldn’t follow much of what was happening with El Cid and the forces that were out to get him before he conquered them. Moors, Iberia, and heavy-duty medieval costuming were beyond my frame of reference. Having consumed my box of Red Hots, I was weaponless in the fight against boredom.
After forever, dramatic music reached its finale and Moorish Spain gave way to a beige screen bearing the word, INTERMISSION. Less dramatic music continued. One by one, here and there, other people in the theater rose from their seats and started slowly toward the lobby. By their lackadaisical pace, I figured that perhaps they’d fallen asleep and were just now waking up.
I looked at my row of birthday partiers, already on their feet, and said something along the lines of “Okay, uh, let’s go.”
My friends followed me into the lobby. I proceeded to the side of the little ticket booth where an old vertical rotary phone hung on the side. After a movie let out, Mr. and Mrs. Olson, the theater owners, let you use the phone to call your parents. I’d beaten everyone else to the phone—but then again, outside of my own group, I hadn’t noticed a lot of kids watching El Cid.
INTERMISSION (cont.)
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
