Sunday, October 26, 2014

Halloween Wins!

How the most rag-tag of holidays became the most important of them all.

By Lars Trodson



As Orson Welles so famously said, “That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian, it's Halloween!

By which Orson and I mean to say that it is now Halloween all year long. As children, we were admonished to keep the spirit of Christmas in our hearts everyday of the year. But no one is that cheerful. We barely celebrate the spirit of Christmas for an entire day anymore.

As it turns out, it’s much easier, perhaps because it more closely matches the dark heart of the world, to celebrate the dead and the undead. You would not be paranoid to believe that there is death all around us. The name is also great. Look at it. Look at the letters strung together. Halloween. We say it and see it so often that we forget what the word actually looks like. But if you take a second to actually read it, it seems even stranger still.

Halloween.

Sunday, October 19, 2014

The Sphinx Unearthed!

By Lars Trodson

It's true.

A team of esteemed archeaologists have spent years unearthing one of man's greatest and most mysterious treasures, the ancient Sphinx. The find has been soberly reported in major newspapers and and science journals this past week.

Only this Sphinx is the one that was built for Cecil B. DeMille's first version of "The Ten Commandments," which was made some 90 years ago in the ancient, mysterious town of Los Angeles. It's made of plaster and is in rough shape, being buried in sand and all (see: Original Sphinx.) But these scientists have brought it above ground, and the old artifact can now be seen by grateful future generations. It was, just as an aside, one of 23 Sphinxes built for the movie.



Sunday, October 5, 2014

Running the Empire



By Lars Trodson

I spent this past season as the manager of The Empire Theater, on Block Island, Rhode Island. The theater has a beautiful dark wood interior. There are two huge posters, one on each side of the screen, advertising live theatrical productions that were performed at the theater in the early 1900s, before the place started to show movies. There is a ticket booth that will conjure images of Fortune Tellers on Coney Island, and a concession stand that consists of one popcorn machine, a soda dispenser with no ice, and a glass candy display case that was built in Philadelphia in 1882 — the year the theater was first built as a roller skating rink. If you want espresso, green tea, or cheese nachos with your movie, then you’ll have to head to the mainland. 

The Empire only shows one film at a time, something that’s always clearly stated on the big marquee outside the theater, but no one reads any more. People ask if they should go left or right to see the movie they just paid for (there are two entrances to the one screen). And, yes, you have to pay in cash. More than one customer has left a down payment (completely unnecessary) as they run off to the nearest ATM machine in order to get enough cash to pay for their bloc of tickets.