When I was a kid, my family moved to a small town. There were lots of
things to be amazed about in that small town, but the first thing that
struck me as amazing was that you only needed four digits to call
someone in town. That was cool. And, some of the phone lines were
party lines.
For the youngsters in the crowd, I'll attempt an explanation. Imagine
not having cell phones. If you wanted to call someone, say someone you
might have a crush on, or maybe just a friend, you either had to do it
from a payphone somewhere in town, which cost money, or do it from
home. And, of course, you had to hope that they were at home, because
that's where the phone stayed. It plugged into the wall. With wires.
No wireless. You HAD to be at home to answer the phone. Okay, got it?
Good.
Now, imagine calling someone, say it's someone you had a crush on, and
when you call them, their phone rings a funny way, a distinctive way
so that they know the phone is for their household only. This is
because the same set of wires to connect their phone also went to
their neighbor's house, and maybe a third neighbor somewhere down the
street. They shared a phone line. So in actuality, any one of those
three people could pick up the phone. Or worse, your love interested
could pick up the phone and any one of the other two parties could
listen in. Horrors! Well, that's the way it was.
Eventually the phone company upgraded our phone system so that you had
to dial all seven digits to get anyone in town.
As a consequence, I still remember a lot of the four-digit numbers to
friends and some of the businesses. I still remember the number to our
"twin cinemas" movie theater.
We were lucky to have a movie theater in our town. Some of our
neighboring towns had none. And, ours was a twin! TWO movies could
play at the same time! We had choices, and it was nice.
Gary was the guy who ran the theater. He was a pretty cool guy. I was
volunteering at the town hall across the street one day when I
discovered a projection room upstairs that had been boarded up for
decades. We found out that the town hall was a theater back in the
1920s. Well, I was discussing this with Gary, the twin cinema guy, and
he invited me upstairs to look at a modern projection room. I learned
a few of his tricks. For example, he didn't have one of the more
modern setups where they could splice the film together and show it on
a giant reel. He had to switch from one projector to the next right at
the correct moment. Gary told me that he would put a quarter in the
reel just a few minutes before the end so that the quarter would drop,
making a sound to wake him up and alert him to start the next
projector. Low tech at its finest.
Gary also ran movies on Monday nights for the ladies. All ladies got a
movie on Monday night for one dollar. The idea was, while their man
was at home watching football, the ladies would have something to do.
I remember standing in line one Monday night and seeing a guy from
school, Mark Fisher, standing in line and wearing a dress. Gary saw
him and said, "Anyone willing to dress up like that in public can get
in for a buck."
Is there a point to all of this? Yes. I just wanted to let you know
that there is a reason any mention of the Star Wars franchise makes me
think of cross-dressing. Now you know.
