Chapter 18
Eighteen
Blue Plate Picture Palace has offered Discount Thursday Mystery Double Feature longer than I’ve been alive. The only mystery
is why “mystery” is in the title because it’s almost always an eclectic sci-fi pairing curated by the theater’s owner, Ms.
Sinclair.
The first film starts at two o’clock, which is why I told Efraín to meet me half an hour before showtime. I have a routine:
get my tickets, make two minutes of small talk with Ms. Sinclair, and claim the perfect seat. Pacing under the marquee and
obsessively checking my phone are not part of my routine.
“Hey, Eli!”
Here I thought I’d been doing an admirable job of keeping my pacing out of view of the ticket box. Sheepishly, I face Ms.
Sinclair like the kid who gets caught sneaking into an R-rated movie.
“Thought I saw you there.” Ms. Sinclair has a timeless celluloid face, but her fine wrinkles come out when she smiles. Her locs are more pepper than salt. If I didn’t know the theater’s history, I couldn’t ballpark her age. “You want the usual?”
“Yes, but—I’m waiting for someone?”
She lets out a low whistle. “Hot date?”
I cringe like I do at some of the Paleolithic B movie special effects I see here. The concept of Efraín and me on a hot date
is too much for my frontal lobe to process. “No, nothing like that. Just—” How do I classify who Efraín is to me? Classmate.
Rival. Carpool buddy. Fellow worker. The constant thorn in my side whom I spontaneously panic-invited to join my sacred Thursday
afternoon moviegoing ritual because I felt . . . something. “He’s just a friend.”
“Mm-hmm. That’s what I used to say about Mr. Sinclair, back before he found the missing reel in the basement.”
“Wh—” I almost fall for it. Even recognizing the bait for what it is, I almost let myself be pulled in because Ms. Sinclair’s
stories are that good. “You know what? I’ll just pay for both tickets now. Both sets, I mean.” I rummage through my pocket
for my debit card.
I’d rather pay for Efraín than miss the opening credits. I can spare the extra $7.50 to support a local business.
Ms. Sinclair smiles, sardonic. “Sure, Eli. You and your date for the double feature comes to—”
“Two for the double feature? This should cover it.” A long arm reaches over my shoulder and slaps a credit card on the counter.
Suddenly, Efraín’s right behind me, leaning over me, close enough to touch.
He’s overwhelming, heat and the distinctive coconut-something scent of his shampoo-conditioner-aftershave-cologne-whatever.
Ms. Sinclair looks from me to Efraín and back again. “This your ‘friend’?”
“Jury’s still out.”
Efraín doesn’t laugh, not audibly, but he’s close enough that I can feel his amused huff, a puff of hot air against my neck.
Ms. Sinclair doesn’t hide her delight as Efraín taps his card on the reader. He does the whole thing one-handed, working around
me. It doesn’t occur to me to scoot over until he’s already tipped twenty-five percent. I’m too busy thinking that charity
is the last thing I want from Efraín. Would it be a jerk move to Venmo him $7.50 right now?
Ms. Sinclair slides over four purely symbolic Admit Ones. No one checks the tickets. “Enjoy the show, boys.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Efraín says with that charming, deferential smile he only bestows upon adults once he’s decided they’ve
earned it. “I’m sure we will.”
Efraín finally steps back, and I finally breathe a full-belly breath. Even for a heatwave, I swear the temperature’s gone
up ten degrees in the last ten minutes.
Efraín holds open the door, all mock chivalry. “What show did I just buy tickets for, anyway?”
“Oh, right.” I smile, high on air-conditioning and mirth. “That’s not how this works.”
“How does it work?”
“We find out when the show starts.”
Even with Efraín’s tardiness, we’re still early.
“I never realized this place was so huge,” Efraín observes when we step into the single theater, which looks exactly how I would expect it to look. Red-curtained walls. Three wedges of shabby seats separated by illuminated aisles.
“It’s actually small for a picture palace. Just seven hundred seats—wait. Are you implying you’ve never been here before?”
“Yep.”
I stop in my tracks, my Vans snagging the art deco carpet. “This is the only theater in Egan’s Creek. How have you never been here?”
“I’ve never been into movies.”
“You do realize that you work at a museum dedicated to a TV show, right?”
Efraín rolls his eyes.
I stare at him, shrugging so casually, like it’s nothing. Like it isn’t weird that we’re here, together, picking out seats
for four to five hours of surprise cinema.
“This should be good, right?”
Efraín’s pointing to the back row.
“Oh my God.”
“What? There’s no stadium seating, and you’re—”
“Vertically challenged?”
“Sure. If anyone sits in front of us—”
“It’s a Thursday matinee in a theater whose fire capacity is roughly seventy-five percent of the town’s population. Thanks
for your concern, but no one’s going to obstruct my view. For your education: The sweet spot is dead center of the middle
row. Best acoustics, and the screen fills your field of view without overwhelming you.”
“Then by all means. Lead the way.”
I get my perfect seat, the one I always seek out. Of course, it’s not a perfect seat. It’s lumpy, and the burgundy fabric scratches my skin, but I’m used to that. The absence of armrests is regrettable,
but what I forget, after so many solo screenings, is how narrow each seat is.
Efraín fills out the seat next to mine. I scoot to the right. It’s all fine.
A few people straggle in and scatter throughout the theater. Efraín’s hugging his kettle corn tub. I’m checking my watch every
two seconds, trying not to mistake every shadow for the dimming of the house lights.
Apropos of nothing, Efraín says, “Kind of a weird name.”
“Discount Thursday Mystery Double Feature? Yeah, it’s a tongue twister.”
“No, Blue Plate. Sounds like a dinner special, not a movie theater.”
“It’s a reference to the Great Depression, actually.”
That earns me a skeptical side-eye.
Time to sing for my supper. “Before the Depression, the film industry was booming, especially with talkies taking off. Instead
of novelty nickelodeon theaters, fancy ‘picture palaces’ were going up all over the country. Up to two thousand seats, Greco-Roman
architecture, air-conditioning—they called them ‘palaces’ for a reason. It was a luxury experience.
“But then the Depression hit, twenty-five percent unemployment, and no one could afford a luxury experience because you can’t
spell ‘disposable income’ without ‘income.’ So, these picture palaces were fighting for their lives. Instead of luxury, they
offered essentials. They held weekly raffles and giveaways for things like dishes. Blue plate specials. Come back week after week to complete your set, except they were more popular than the theaters anticipated. Moviegoers got
into fistfights over the prizes. It sounds slapstick, but it worked. Not all the theaters survived, but the film industry did. Because people needed movies.”
“People needed food and shelter,” Efraín says, that obsidian edge in his voice. “Jobs.”
“No, I mean, of course. But it’s not just—” I’d knock my head against the seatback if it were tall enough.
“Fast-forward fifteen years. This place, the original Blue Plate Picture Palace, didn’t open until after the war, when movies were booming.
It squeaked by when home TVs hit the market.
The whole town fundraised for renovations during the Cinerama craze.
But the theater couldn’t keep up when color TVs became more affordable.
Blue Plate closed in the early seventies, just before the advent of the summer blockbuster—Jaws, then Star Wars—unlikely salvation for a withering industry. ”
“So Egan’s Creek had another fundraiser?”
I know he doesn’t seriously want to know. But I want to tell this story—to him.
“Victor Kane happened. He went to every Discount Thursday Mystery Double Feature growing up. This is where he fell in love
with film, but Blue Plate closed while he was in Vietnam. When he came back here after his stint in Hollywood, he bought and
restored it. Frances Sinclair was his first disaffected teen hire. Later, he left her the place with a hefty endowment to
keep it running as long as the world kept making movies.”
Efraín gets that tilde between his eyes. “But Kane made TV.”
“Yes?”
“Movies and TV are different.”
“Sure, they’re very different mediums, artistically, but in one way, they’re exactly the same.”
“Yeah?”
“What I said before—that the film industry survived the Great Depression because people needed movies—that was imprecise.
I should’ve said: People need stories. They’re comfort, yes, but also sustenance. Movies, TV, novels, comics, theater, campfire ghost stories, it’s all vital,
like food or water.”
“You really believe that?”
“You have causes, and I have stories. Is that so hard to believe?”
He looks at me and looks at me and just when I think he’s going to say something profound, he mutters, “Huh.”
I want him to understand. I nudge Efraín’s shoulder.
“What?”
“Look up,” I whisper.
His eyes go wide at the sight of the ceiling, gaudy with baroque fixtures, but painted like the night sky. The winter constellations
of the Northern Hemisphere are outlined. A mythological mural writ in stelliscript.
In the dark of the matinee, Efraín takes it all in. I watch him until the house lights dim, the projector hums, and the opening
credits roll.