Thursday, January 12, 2017

The Weekly Screed (#799)

Saturdays at the Erwin
by David Benjamin

“What is it?/ Hey, why it’s Buttercup/ Popcorn!/ Add sweet cream butter to hot popcorn,/ Mix it up, wrap it up,/ Buttercup is born./ It’s delicious!/ So nutritious!/ It’s a taste delight!/ It’s so munchy , crisp and crunchy!/ You’ll enjoy each bite./ Eat Buttercup, Buttercup,/ Popcorn at its best./ It beats all the rest!”
                       — Movie intermission jingle, ca. 1953

MADISON, Wis. — A kid named Chucky Dutcher was my mentor in the art of moviegoing. A slightly disreputable urchin from a sprawling, unruly family who lived on the wrong side of the Milwaukee Road tracks in Tomah, Chucky was the unlikeliest of cinema mavens, if only because in school he had a hard time sitting still.

Like many of my early friends, Chucky was a street kid who had no curfew, lived by his wits, talked out of both sides of his mouth and knew where the action was. In a small town, the movies represented a reliable source of action, at least ’til we were old enough to drink. So, the movies is where Chucky went — and sat more or less still, even at the risk of refining his tastes and improving his mind.

For most Tomah kids, moviegoing came two ways. One was with your parents, usually in the family Ford to the drive-in out by Routes 12 and 21, always a double feature (one of my fondest memories was a twin-bill of The Thing and The Deadly Mantis). Trouble was, the drive-in closed in September and didn’t re-open ’til almost summertime. In the cold months, you could beg mom and dad for an evening out at the Erwin Theater. But for me, with two working — then separated, then downright divorced — parents, such excursions were damn scarce. And I had no recourse to grandparents. None of them had been to the flicks since the Depression.

Tomah’s only other portal to Hollywood, for kids, was a Saturday matinee program sponsored by the Erwin. In school, for two bucks, you bought a precious ten-week perforated card of movie tickets (Lassie, Doris Day, Tommy Sands, Roy Rogers, Francis the Talking Mule). Parents — even those as hard-up as mine — gladly ponied up the deuce because it promised two or three hours of kid-free tranquility every Saturday afternoon during the diphtheric Wisconsin winter.
 
One blessing of the Erwin matinee was that all ten movies were approved by the Legion of Decency (thus indemnifying me from a Near Occasion of Sin). The worst part was an entire movie house full of other kids, screaming, fighting, running up and down the aisles and smelling like Dubble Bubble wrapped in dirty underwear.

And then, when you piled out of the Erwin in a mad, violent mass evacuation, prodded along by sadistic teenage ushers, the sun was still somewhere up there, sulking behind a leaden overcast. Tomah, in daylight, in the dead of November, projected a bleakness that made the Erwin — with its Technicolor screen and Dmitri Tiomkin scores, its cavalcade of stars, and its walls adorned with Indian-themed art-deco murals — seem like either Shangri-La or a cruel hoax devised to make fragile children hate their lives.

Chucky Dutcher’s solution to the normal kid’s Hollywood hunger was the personal, unauthorized, 25-cent Erwin marathon. On a cold Saturday after matinee season, Chucky and I ventured parentless to the Erwin for the early showing of Journey to the Center of the Earth, starring Pat Boone and James Mason. We watched all five showings. Next day, after church, we went back and watched it five more times.

We skipped four meals and didn’t get home — twice — ’til almost midnight. Nobody commented, or even noticed our absence from the world, because Chucky and I were, by popular local consensus, destined for delinquency. We both had parents too busy, too troubled, too tired to care whether we were in the house or off someplace. They’d just as soon we stayed away as much as possible. As long as the police didn’t bring us home, we were on our own.

I figured out quick that it’s hard to go ten hours in the movies without nourishment. There was food, of course, in abundance, at the Erwin, but you had to buy it. Neither Chucky nor I exactly had a stash of ready cash. We had to husband our nickels and dimes and make prudent meal choices. The most heralded of cinema cuisine, Buttercup popcorn, was usually beyond our means, as were most of the classic candy bars — Snickers, Milky Way, Mr. Goodbar, etc.

Instead, we focused on the proletarian candy choices on the lower shelves behind the glass. You had to know your options and choose fast, because the hostile high-school girl behind the counter hated little kids, there were twelve bigger people behind you and — you could hear him — Lowell Thomas had already begun, in that immortal, mellifluous baritone, the Movietone News. Hurry!

My all-time favorite Erwin entrée was Raisinets. But they ate fast and didn’t last. You’d be digging up your final raisin before the end of the first reel. And you couldn’t go back for more. No self-respecting kid ever left his seat during the film, even to take  a leak or puke. Ever. You were glued to the screen.

Other ill-advised movie victuals were nonpareils, chocolate cigarettes, Spearmint Leaves, Good & Plenty, Junior Mints, M&Ms and malted milk balls. Tasty but ephemeral. If you wanted staying power, you leaned toward the classic filling-pullers — Dots, Jujubes, Jujyfruits — or the little rocks you had to suck. Root beer barrels, Lifesavers (dull but durable), and, especially,  Jawbreakers. A ten-cent box of Jawbreakers once got me through all three hours of Ben-Hur.

Above all, there was one movie meal you could chew ravenously or suck subtly, devour in one reel or nurse through the credits. A caramel-centered chocolate-covered minié ball invented in 1926 by Sean Le Noble, the Milk Dud, for any kid who ever went to the movies, is the pinnacle of 20th-century confectionery.

The magic of a movie marathon was that, once you were settled into your Erwin homestead, with a supply of Milk Duds and Jawbreakers (and nothing to drink lest you need to pee), you were immersed. Sunk into your seat while audience after audience came and went, you uncoupled from reality. You became film, and film became you. You weren’t in Tomah, but in Scotland and underneath Iceland with the Lindenbrook expedition. After I’d seen Journey to the Center of the Earth ten times in 48 hours, I was ready to converse with Pauline Kael on the delicate nuance in Pat Boone’s Thespian style, and the mounting insinuation of Arlene Dahl’s raw sexuality.

By and by, you became, inevitably, irresistibly — for the rest of your life — a line memorizer. You began, innocently, by saying, along with James Mason, “Never interrupt a murderer, madam.” You end up in a gin joint, hollering at perfect strangers, “Goddammit! It’s not ‘Play it again, Sam.’ It’s just ‘Play! It! Sam!’”

Then, one day, without warning, Chucky’s nomadic dad uprooted the whole shebang and disappeared to God-knows-where. Luckily, I didn’t need a sidekick anymore (unless it was Maureen O’Hara). I’d been lured into the Erwin and seduced by Hollywood. I was probably the first kid in my grade to solo at the movies. Alone in the dark, I got my first glimpse of the Final Solution in the scariest film I ever saw, a documentary called Mein Kampf. I fell in love with Jean Seberg in The Mouse That Roared. I watched Steve Reeves in Hercules and Hercules Unchained at least eight times each. I spent one sublime day learning how to dance from Zorba the Greek.

And afterwards…

Coming out the door from the warm Erwin womb into the arctic dark of Tomah at midnight, I beheld the yellow street lights suffusing the bars, diners and storefronts along Superior Avenue with the faint golden glow of a backlot New York.

If I squinted a little, succumbing to the sugar in my bloodstream and the chill of the night, I could just barely see, under a faroff, flickering streetlamp, the silhouettes of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, kissing in desperate haste before fleeing into the darkness from the killer on their trail.

2 comments:

Diane D said...

your blog is wonderful! I, too, went to the movies at the Erwin on Saturdays. I remember Westerns mostly and when i came out i would try to recreate the entire story in my head. I seem to remember we got 10 tickets for $1.25 through some promotion with the Miller School. It doesn't sound quite right but money then isn't what it is today.

I saw the Academy awards on TV for the first time when i was about 10 years old and as they were giving out the awards I realized that none of the movies had yet made it to Tomah. This kind of took the air out of the balloon but there were still my teens years to enjoy some fun times there.

i saw " A hard Days Night" and when it was over my friend and i decided to watch it again. The one and only time i ever did this.

And then "Easy Rider" in High school. This movie alone gave me the taste for travel.


Wow! thank you for all the good memories!!

JD said...

Mom loved the movies, which is how I wound up seeing Elizabeth Taylor schlepping around New York City in a slip and mink coat in "Butterfield 8" at a shockingly early age. I remember her taking me to "Suddenly Last Summer" at the Erwin too; for some reason, SH e was reluctant to discuss whatever it was that was happening to Sebastian Venables on that beach. I spent a lot of time at the Erwin, saw a lot of good and bad flicks there. Thanks for bringing back the good, non-Virgil Bachman memories.