It’s about being a parent, apparently, and the time was in the immediate aftermath of the New Year in early 1977. There were only the three older children then, James, Jon and little Rebecca, who were five, four and three at the time. I was in my second (of nine terms) at law school, studying very hard, and I recall that it was very cold that winter. However, this story is perhaps more about me than about the children or the weather.
In early January, I took the three children to the movies to see a re-make of a 1930's classic, “King Kong.” For weeks into December the television commercials excited everyone. I had promised that we would go to see it over Christmas time but here it was January already, so I said, “next Sunday for sure.”
On that Sunday morning we awoke to a huge blizzard of snow. Everything was covered with drifts and from the window I saw that our car was just a white hump in the snow. It was still snowing heavily and the wind was blowing very large flakes.
But I had promised. So after I had checked by telephone that the theater was even open, we all bundled up, off we went. The matinee started at 1:00 PM and we left our house just before 12:00 noon, allowing about three times the amount of time that would be normally necessary to get to the west side where the theater was located. As I recall, we traveled at a speed no higher than 10 miles an hour, with the windshield wipers constantly on high speed, and the defroster blower fan maxed to its limit. It seemed that everything outside the car was white and the wind was ferocious.
We eventually arrived at about ten minutes after the hour. I saw what I thought to be scarcely few cars in the parking lot. So, I hurried everyone inside to the ticket window and then through the doors and down an aisle into a totally dark theater. The movie had already started.
At first I didn’t notice that anything was wrong as I proceeded down a few steps down the aisle. The only light was coming from the screen and I recall that it was the part when Jessica Lange was tied up on the jungle alter and there were sounds of something very large approaching. For some unknown reason, could not see the silhouetted outline of the children ahead of me but, feeling their heads, quietly instructed them to take off their hats and bulky snow jackets.
Meanwhile, I squinted as I turned my head to my right in an attempt to see if there were anyone was seated in the row. I was sure that there weren’t many people in the theater because of the weather, the early matinee, and that the movie had been out for over a month already.
But I recall subconsciously questioning myself as why I couldn’t see anything except for the screen, but I didn’t dwell on it very long. I reached over to the first seat to my right and immediately felt someone’s head. I apologetically said, “Oh, I’m sorry,” immediately moving up a few rows where I bent over and looked directly at where a person should be, saw nothing, put my hand over to touch the back of the seat and instead placed it squarely on someone’s face. Now I was profusely apologetic but nonetheless walked down a few more rows, reached over, tentatively this time, and felt just the back of the seat! I think the words, “thank God,” came to mind as I stared and squinted in the hope that I might see who, if anyone, might be in the three adjoining seats next to this one. There seemed to be no one so I told the children to quickly move in and sit down as I went in after them, throwing my wet snow jacket behind me to blanket the seat which I was about to occupy. Meanwhile, King Kong had just shown himself for the first time and the woman on the screen was going berserk.
As is common knowledge, the bottom seat cushion in movie theaters folds up and goes down on some spring mechanism better allowing for people to move down the row and for the people who sweep up after the theater closes. After I threw back my jacket against the seat, I sat down, first once, then twice... then a third time to get the seat to go down. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with this seat. I reached around under my heavy jacket and, to my astonishment, felt a crushed box of popcorn, and, feeling further, discovered some little kid’s head! I sprung like a rocket from my seat, turned around facing the direction of the now uncovered seat, and said, “I am SO sorry!” to this person that I couldn’t see. Just then, and despite the high excitement on the screen, this entire section of the theater, evidentially children, could hold in their laughter no longer and erupted in a total hysteria the likes of which I had never heard before or since. Logic suddenly kicked in as I realized that the pupils of my eyes must have constricted to a near microscopic size from driving over an hour in blinding white snow. I jumped up, grabbed the children, and beat a hasty retreat to the lobby where we waited perhaps ten minutes while matrons and ushers, who had no idea why this almost riotous laughter was occurring during the most frightening part of the movie, tried to calm down and silence an uncontrollable pandemonium. Only then, after I was reasonably sure that my eyes had adjusted, we very quietly moved down an aisle on the other side of the theater and found some empty seats.
Still, at different times during the hour and a half duration of the film, that same section of the theater broke out in two or three minute bouts of wild laughter, no doubt in vivid memory of vaudeville that we had provided.
Since that time I have wondered every so often whether that young person, who at the height of the movie’s suspense, had King Kong actually pay a personal visit to him, would ever need therapy resulting from why someone, who he was sure could see him before he was buried beneath a heavy jacket, would repeatedly try to sit on and crush him for seemingly no reason whatsoever.
It is somewhat of a relief for me that the Statute of Limitations, thankfully, has since run.
