MY ‘MOVIE-SCHOOL-YEAR’ by LINDA LEE GREENE©
I was in my final year at Everett Junior High
School in Columbus, Ohio, USA when Elvis Presley’s film ‘Jailhouse Rock’ exploded in movie theaters across the
nation. That year, the school was undergoing renovation, and class schedules
were allocated to accommodate the work. Half of the student body attended
morning classes with afternoons off, and the other half attended afternoon
classes with mornings off. I was a morning student, lucky me; lucky because at the
noon hour of nearly every school day, I caught a city bus into town center, and
handing over my quarter to the person in the ticket booth, strolled into the
dark womb of a theater and lost myself in a movie.
Columbus
is fortunate to have two iconic theaters as centerpieces of its downtown core:
the incomparable ‘Ohio Theater’ and the exceptional ‘Palace Theater.’ I was
present at a concert a few years ago starring Tony Bennett. It was held at the ‘Palace,’
and he stated to the audience that it had the best acoustics of almost any
venue in which he had ever appeared. He lowered his microphone and sang
acapella to demonstrate the theater’s superior sound quality. His voice,
unequalled by any but Andrea Bocelli’s, in my opinion, rang through the theater
as clear as a bell.
Back in
my favorite year of school, my ‘movie-school-year,’ as I think of it, I spent
my afternoons in one or the other of Columbus’ two wonderful downtown theaters,
for the most part. I was, by that time, a diehard movie buff, a veteran, to my
way of thinking, catching as many movies as possible on our black and white,
console television-set in the living room of our home, or watching
double-feature movies with school friends at the neighborhood ‘Garden Theater,’
located at the corner of High Street and West Fifth Avenue, just a stone’s
throw from the school. Year after year, my little sister, Sherri and I stayed
up long past our bedtime to watch the Academy Awards, and we could tell you
from memory the winners of the Best Actor and Best Actress categories of every
year of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and maybe into the 80s.
Those
afternoons in the downtown theaters all alone and enthralled by the stories
that in my innocence I dared to imagine would mirror of my own someday, were my
best film experiences, however. I saw on the big screen Cary Grant and Debra
Kerr in perhaps the greatest movie romance of all time, ‘An Affair to Remember.’
‘The Bridge on the River Kwai,’ ‘Funny Face,’ and Marilyn Monroe’s troubled
performance in ‘The Prince and the Showgirl’ were among the films I saw that year. Our
curiosity was aroused by the rumor that Monroe’s erratic behavior had aged her
co-star and director, Lawrence Olivier by 15 years. Despite it all, Monroe was
then and is to this day, one of my favorites. Lana Turner’s ‘Peyton Place’ was
on tap that year, too. The list goes on and on. But Elvis Presley in ‘Jailhouse
Rock’ was the most memorable of all. Teenagers in American and beyond were his
slaves, our bondage having begun with his historical first appearance on the ‘Ed
Sullivan Show’ on TV the year before,
and in the two movies he had made before ‘Jailhouse.’ Every teenager in America
with access to a TV had experienced Elvis on Ed Sullivan, our eyes glued to the
screen, our hearts pounding with every gyration of his famous hips and flip of
the shiny, black shock of hair that suspended over his matchless brow. Was there
a handsomer, sexier, and more talented human being ever to grace our lives?
A group of us girls piled onto the city bus
the afternoon we were going to take in Elvis’ on the giant, silver screen, each
of us wearing our best frocks, and having paid special attention to our hairdos
and makeup. And yes, when that unparalleled, that ‘dangerous’ beauty of a man
appeared on screen in his black and white striped, prison garb, we jumped from
our seats and raced en masse to the front of the theater. And throughout the
entire production, we jumped up and down; we screamed ourselves silly; we
pulled our hair; we burst into rivers of tears, and one or two of the girls actually
swooned, comatose to the floor. Oh happy days!
Multi-award
winning author Linda Lee Greene’s books are available worldwide in soft cover
and eBook formats on Amazon and other online booksellers.
