Making Concessions

My very first job was working concessions at the old Lincoln Village movie theater on the North Side of Chicago. It was a theater where I had seen many many movies (from Batman to JFK). It was the summer of 1994 and I had just graduated from high school and it was a busy summer for movies. My brief time there covered The Lion King, Speed, and The Mask, into the fall of Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption and Interview with the Vampire. It was a fairly old cinema, with an aged 1970's aesthetic. It was somewhere between the shiny new shopping mall-looking theaters and the beautiful old movie palaces like the Nortown. It had a history. Hundreds of thousands of people sat in darkened theaters watching movies there during its time, sharing stories and letting their imaginations run free.

These days, going to the movies has become a pretty awful experience. The ticket prices are outrageous, the cinemas lack personality, and the concession experience has become a miserable DIY activity. Gone are the days when you can ask for extra salt or butter in the middle of your bag of popcorn. You are given a bag and sent to a side station where there is a butter pump and a container of table salt. Actual popcorn salt is available for sale behind the concession stand. Yes, you are expected to buy it and apparently carry it in some kind of movie kit every time you go out to the show. Nachos come with a small, sealed, container of cheese. Pretzels are puffy limp things that come in weird nondescript plastic bags of humidity. Salt is available on request.

I've been busy doing some headwork for a writing project that involves reconstructing a stretch of the Rogers Park neighborhood, circa 1980. It involves a different kind of archeology than the type than the type with which I am usually preoccupied. A landmark of that neighborhood during my childhood was the great Adelphi theater, where I saw Return of the Jedi about 20 times when I was a kid. It was torn down several years ago. I went to visit its former location today, only to find a still-empty lot. I miss good movie theaters. I feel bad that I took places like the Adelphi, the Nortown, and even the Lincoln Village for granted while they were still around.


Patrick Garone
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