the movies

i love going to the movies. love love love going to the movies. the theatre, i mean. where there is no pause button, no bathroom, telephone ringing, mom's calling excuse to stop the film middway and ruin the dream. the great blackness that equalizes and anyonymtizes a crowd of people. the darkness that makes us go hush and sh. that everyone agrees (most everyone, anyway) to shut up for a while, to turn off our phones and just listen. hear a tale. that the old fireside storytelling genes, that they're alive and well, and that even if most adult men have some pathetic aversion to fiction reading (i think they are convinced it is all harry potter children's nonsense, or romance stories for women - i think they have never read ernest hemingway, raymond chandler, cormac mccarthy, rawi hage and a hundred other men writing for men about men) at least we can agree on listening to a story told on a big curved screen in a deep dark theatre, the sound so loud, the excitement as the hollywood studio song comes on, then the real intensity as the film proper begins and the score comes in, or a pop song, or no song at all. just. silence. whatever it is. however it starts. always, at that very beginning. promise. i pay $12 for that. every time.