Gene Hackman and the fountain of youth

DAVID SILVA

“Six children and two adults.”

The woman in the ticket booth looked past my parents at my

brothers and sisters and me. Linda and Diana, the second and third

oldest of the kids, were taller than my mom. The oldest, Yvonne, was

smoking.

“You’re telling me these girls are under 12?” the woman asked, her

half-lidded expression signaling her incredulity.

My mother nodded in grave earnest.

“Um, do you mind if I see their IDs?”

“Oh, they’re much too young to have IDs,” Mom replied.

“Uh huh.”

My siblings and I held our breaths. If it came down that the girls

had to buy adult tickets, it would mean at least four of us were out

of luck and would be sent home. Finally, the ticket clerk sighed.

“Whatever,” she said. “Nineteen dollars, please.”

Yvonne stubbed out her cigarette, and we all walked in.

At least one Friday every month, Mom and Dad would herd the kids

up the four blocks from our home to the California Theater to catch

whatever was showing. It was a big deal for everyone. Next to picnics

in the park or a day at the beach, movies were the only family

entertainment outside the home we could afford. But as the years

passed and movie night grew potentially less and less affordable, the

ticket booth became a kind of fountain of youth for my mother’s

children. We would step up to it, and years would wash away like

magic.

By the time my sisters were in high school, our motion picture

entertainment was almost entirely dependent on the kindness,

ambivalence, or nearsightedness of the ticket clerk. It was an

embarrassing spectacle, watching Mom song-and-dance our way into the

theater every month. But it certainly wasn’t the most embarrassing

aspect of movie night.

Once through the doors, my brother Michael and I made a beeline

for the concession stand.

“Popcorn!” Michael would shout brightly. “Popcorn! Junior Mints!

Coke!”

“Raisinettes!” I’d shout. “Milk Duds! And Coke!”

It was another example of the eternal optimism of youth. Because

the moment our mother entered she yelled at us to quit dreaming and

fall back in line. No way was Mom going to pay three times the retail

price of anything. Instead, she always sneaked a large bag of Brach’s

candy into the theater and in the lobby doled out handfuls to us that

we were expected to much on throughout the show.

This was the most embarrassing aspect of movie night.

Since the California Theater was one of only two movie houses in

town that showed English-language or non-porn films, it was always

packed, making it a practical impossibility for my parents to find

eight seats clustered together. Instead, my brothers and I would find

seats together on one side of the theater, while our sisters sat on

the other. Our parents would strategically position themselves

somewhere in the middle, wherever they could get the best view of

both the screen and the kids at the same time.

Unfortunately for the rest of the moviegoers, this triangulation

of seating did nothing to cut down on the conversations among the

family as a whole.

“Hey, Linda!” Michael would shout across the rows. “Why did Gene

Hackman just shoot that guy?”

“Shh!” a dozen angry strangers would shush at once.

“I don’t know!” Linda would shout back. “Hey, ma! Why did Gene

Hackman shoot that guy?”

“SHH!”

“I don’t know! Do you kids want any more candy?”

It never mattered what film was playing on movie night. The

California Theater had only one screen at the time, and whatever was

on it, that’s what we saw. My parents rarely bothered to read the

reviews; the only advance knowledge we ever had of the films came

from the occasional word of mouth. This led to a lot of

miscommunication over the years.

“Oh, I heard this is a good movie,” my mother said once as we were

walking toward the theater. “Diana’s friend told her about it. It’s

called ‘George.’”

“What’s it about?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Mom answered. “A guy named George, I guess.”

The film was, in fact, called “Jaws,” and wound up scaring me so

bad that I refused to take baths for a month.

It also didn’t matter whether the film we saw had an R rating. My

dad wasn’t about to let a little thing like age appropriateness stop

him from enjoying his Friday night. Since the California still

operated under the belief that G-rated films wouldn’t attract big

audiences, my siblings and I often caught a lot of skin on movie

night. Mom was a bit more circumspect than our father on this matter,

and whenever a particularly racy scene popped up a voice would ring

out across the audience: “Davey! Mickey! Junior! Close your eyes!”

My brothers and I would shake our heads as everyone in the theater

roared with laughter.

But aside from its potential for psychological scarring, movie

night was one of the highlights of my childhood. It was one of the

few traditions the family observed religiously and the only one that

didn’t involve dressing up for church. And like so many family

traditions, it fell by the wayside far too soon, seemingly overnight.

My parents divorced. My sisters decided almost in unison that they’d

rather go to the movies with their boyfriends than their brothers.

My mother to this day reminisces of movie night with sadness.

Occasionally, she’ll try to arrange for a group of us to catch a show

together, but it never happens. Too many schedules to coordinate. Too

many varied tastes to agree on a single film.

And in this way, it seems that despite all her efforts, Mom

finally lost the battle at the box office to keep her children

forever young.

* DAVID SILVA is a Times Community News editor. Reach him at (909)

484-7019, or by e-mail at david.silva@latimes.com.