Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

when I was a child in the fifties
the biggest thing was to get ten
cents on a Saturday day
and go down to the liquor store
and buy ten penny candies
or to get fifty cents to go to the Gem theater
to see the matinee and have enough left over
to get pop corn and milk duds

childhood with its vast lost memories
it's sitting in movie theaters watching
what ever crappy movies they happen to have
I'm just a little kid so what do I know
it's the dark room and the hard floor
with the sticky feeling, it's the flickering
ray of light behind me that projects
the images on the screen
some of the stuff I see like flying saucers
or monsters, or Ma and Pa Kettle
war, and cowboys

what is going through my child mind
that I have to grow up and become a beatnik
or a soldier, or an ice cream truck driver
oh, I just ran out of mild duds
and the movie is over
time to go home, so I can watch television
maybe see the Wizard of Oz
more strange images, that I have to look at

Love this, milk duds and popcorn,
and a flickering cowboy matinee...
The Screen Age, now into its 2nd century,
seems to have changed almost everything.

Reminded me (though it probably shouldn't) of Sal and Dean staying overnight in that all-night movie theater in gray Detroit--
"The picture was Cowboy Eddie Dean and his gallant white horse Bloop, and then Peter Lorre in a picture about Istanbul. We saw both of them six times each during the night, awake and dreaming, permeated with the strange Gray Myth of the West and the weird dark Myth of the East. I heard big Greenstreet sneer a hundred times, and Lorre make his sinister come-on . . . and Eddie Dean shot up the rustlers innumerable times"..

I remember it, too....

when i was 8
we moved from hampden
to longmeadow mass...
...from woods and fields
to row after row
of 2-story houses
packed back yard to back yard
from dirt roads
to sidewalks
from dark nights
to street lights
i hated it

but

for the corner drug store
7 cents for a popsicle
10 cents for a comic book
(15 for a classics illustrated,
like the one i got of hg wells
"war of the worlds" - oh,
those huge hooded tentacled tripods!)
and in those pulpy novellas
i dreamed that one day
i'd become a scientist too
whose wit alone
would defeat those giant insects
that military might
could not

movies were a quarter
and they didn't kick you out
you could stay there all day if you had a mind to
candy was a nickel....jujubes and good and plenty
raisinets, turkish taffy, sno-caps
good times for sure, and when you had already spent
your allowance you could turn in soda bottles for cash
or when really desperate a friend could open
the back door to the theater to let you in
there were 4 theaters within walking distance
never got a ride anywhere back then
families had one car and that normally was taken
by dad to go to work...so you walked or hitchhiked
but you never stayed home, saw The Blob
and Tarantula, The Fly....so good....so good

Things were still kinda simple in childhood in the fifties
but were were being used as test dummies, for TV.
some kids were still going to school in one room school
houses. But we were being programed by Hollywood.
we still had Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny
and the tooth fairy, and father knows bats
wacky placks, and baseball cards for a dime
we had rubber band guns, and zip guns
we had rock around the evil clock, and Elvis
and beatniks