Sunday Afternoon at the Movies

We have a new tradition at the Strait house.

We've been turning Sunday afternoons into a classic movie time.  We dim the lights, get some coffee, and maybe later some popcorn and other snacks (something that doesn't require a visit to the small loan department in order to finance, like it does at the regular movie theater), and settle into a movie form yesteryear.  Most of them are from before 1970, many even reaching into the 1930s.

We've seen dance classics with Fred Astaire and Gingers Rogers.  We've comedy classics with Cary Grant, like Monkey Business. and then we've seen suspense thrillers, including the Hitchcock class, Northwest by Northwest, also starring the Cary Grant, in a more dramatic role.  We've also seen Jimmy Stewart westerns, such as Bend of the River, and haunting Gothic romances like Rebecca, with the Thespian's thespian, Sir Lawrence Olivier, and Joan Fontaine.  We've even seen Ladybug, Ladybug, a very realistic movie made in 1963, about rural schoolchildren reacting to a siren  for an impending nuclear attack that may or may not be real.

And we're just getting started.

The cinema gives a perfect opportunity to glimpse into our past, to see things how they were, or how people imagined them to be.  It can give you a fond nostalgia for prior times, both the good and the bad.  Who of us over sixty do not remember the nuclear drills of the past (Duck and Cover!)?  There is a certain sweetness, charm, and even fire, to the more subtle, nuanced sexuality of those times. There is a thrill at watching directors try new effects and cinematic tricks for the first time. There is also cringing at the sometimes inadvertent, sometimes blatant,  racism of some films from bygone eras.

We have  gift that prior generations didn't have.  We have our past filmed and preserved for us.  For a brief couple of hours, actors and actresses who have long since gone, come alive again, in all their vitality and glory.  When we fixate on the new, we tend to lose all that.  We forget our history, we forget where we come from, and how some things have gotten better, and some things gotten worse. When we ignore both literature and history, we tend to repeat the same mistakes, over and over again.

This glorious new interest we have, may soon face the buzz-saw of a competing interest - football.  I can't promise you how it will fare.  We have a diminished interest in football, to a small degree because how our teams of choice fall short even when it looks like they'll compete at a high lever (oh, Atlanta Falcons, how you broke our hearts!), but mostly because we have a growing recognition of the danger of injury, particularly brain injury.  We are slowly coming to the realization that there may be no safe way to play football, and it's making us increasingly uncomfortable watching young men run the risk of those kind of injuries.  We are not to the point of giving up the sport, but we are becoming more and more aware of its dangers.

We may be able to do both, with a little time shifting here and there.  Because Alison and I have grown to enjoy our weekly trip into the cinematic past.

Let's go to the movies!  Next up - On the Town with Gene Kelley and Frank Sinatra!  Can't wait!