Why Movies?

I don’t remember the first movie my parents ever took me to. I discussed this with them recently and they don’t remember either. It might have been ‘Star Wars’ or ‘The Wiz’, where the boy sitting behind me stuck gum in my hair just as Diana Ross woke up from her dream of Oz. (My mother took me to a nearby shopping mall after the movie where a sales clerk from Sears gave me an impromptu haircut and a gob-stopper while my mother received sympathy and the relief of knowing, for at least one month, she was spared the experience of taking me to the barbershop and watching me cry and scream for twenty minutes before the guy cutting my hair flat-out gave up on niceties and tied me to the chair. Priceless.)

But the first time it meant anything happened one afternoon in the summer of 1979 (this would make me all of eight years old) when my father kidnapped my older brother (Jeff) and I and took us to an afternoon showing of ‘Richard Pryor: Live in Concert’. Why my father took our eight and ten-year old selves to see a Richard Pryor concert film will forever elude me but the experience was explosive. The theatre was packed, we had our popcorn, Twizzlers ® (in honor of Mom; she loves licorice), and Coke ® and absolutely no idea who this Richard Pryor person was. Waiting for the movie to start, I noticed the absence of children in the theatre as well as the ethnic and racial diversity of the audience, a rarity of the suburb in which I grew up. The lights went down, the curtain parted (there were still curtains then), everyone went quiet and after a voiceover-ed introduction, Richard Pryor walked out. He seemed a funny looking fellow wearing a shiny red shirt and black pants with a skinny body constantly in motion even in stillness (a perfect comedian’s body). He said hello, made a couple of jokes and then, in response to a female heckler, he said “Why don’t you show me your Pussy!” It was then everything went silent.

Language expansion was something of an obsession back then, with profanity of particular interest but I knew from experience that this particular word carried serious eardrum-shattering, privilege-revoking, wash-your-mouth-out-with-soap consequences. In the split second it took me to look over at my father, my mind was flooded with images of him scooping my brother and I out of our seats and into another theatre to see the latest ‘Herbie’ movie (worse things could happen) lest we all get in trouble with my mother. When I saw him though, he was laughing. And when I saw that, I took a deep breath. And when I took that deep breath, it was as if someone had turned the soundtrack up and that soundtrack was full of laughter. I relaxed into this Richard Pryor person as he spun tales of “Macho” men, winos, girlfriends, parents, heart attacks, shooting his car with a .357 magnum (an object of fascination in those days due to a friend of mine name Chris K. who claimed he had seen one), the nastiness of Doberman pinschers and a rather surreal tale about a horny monkey and its owner’s ear. Sure he swore and used language considered offensive and I didn’t understand half of what I was hearing but not understanding didn’t bother me at all. Everyone was laughing and having such a good time that understanding seemed unimportant.

On the way home my brother and I reenacted certain moments, profanity included, while my father laughed and laughed. Up to that point we had been reared on Bill Cosby and while he was funny, he was nothing like this. Here was a world in which children and adults swore and did not get into trouble; where people pursued sex to an almost humiliating degree but pursued it anyway because the rewards seemed to outweigh the consequences; a world in which adults were not perfect and, more importantly, seemed to be as imperfect and oblivious as children. Bill Cosby was a controlled voice speaking of messy things; Richard Pryor was total anarchy. Here was an adult talking about adult things who felt exactly like I did. As an overly sensitive suburban kid with a stutter and serious confidence problems who found life perpetually and painfully confusing, this was powerful stuff.

Did I realize any of this at the time? Not at all. But in the experience of seeing that movie and driving home and swearing with my brother in front of my father, something happened: There was bonding and freedom but there was also something else: there was a feeling of a world out there full of people I might never meet and experiences I might never have but wanted to know about; there were people who could make me laugh until my stomach hurt and I wanted to meet them; there were words that I would someday be able to say without repercussions (and which would also get me into more serious and complicated kinds of trouble); and most importantly, there all these incredible stories to hear and more than anything else I wanted to hear them. Life as I knew it opened up. It seemed bigger and possible and for the first time I was excited.

Movies always make me feel that way. Always.

Even the bad ones.

Post Script: When I recently asked him why he took us to see the movie, my father didn’t remember and was in fact surprised he’d done it. “I did that?” he said. “I’m a terrible father!” (He was fine)

Post-Post Script: The story about the barbershop is true. Adults – every single one of them - terrified me as a kid and the one my mother took me to every month who carried big scissors gave me nightmares. The only thing that kept me still when tied to the chair was the fear that if I moved, he would grab me by the scruff of my dirty, ice-creamed stained t-shirt and plunge those scissors straight into my brain. The manifestation of this fear must have been a horrible thing for my mother to watch. Sorry Mom.