My Shoulder Chip

I was working in production at The News Leader when I was in my twenties, even though I really wanted to be a reporter. That wasn't happening. I had no mentors or connections, and without that, I needed to go to some small town and get experience on a little community newspaper. I just had a hard time accepting that truth when other people in production were being promoted upstairs to the newsroom. One girl was society-connected and went to a classy private women's college. She got the wedding desk job I applied for. The other was an unwashed hippie type who slept around and sold drugs to editors, so she was given a copy desk job, which actually turns out to be a dead end of the worst kind. The third had not even finished a degree in anything, but she was taken upstairs as a reporter. She was black. There were no black reporters. I guess they needed one.

So when I was given an opportunity to write for the employee newsletter, I thought that was my chance to gain some experience and acquire a mentor. The editor of the newsletter was a former News Leader editor who had been forced upstairs to the executive offices just to get him out of the newsroom when he reached retirement age and wouldn't step down to make room for new blood. I have no idea what he did other than the employee newsletter, which he never wrote any articles for. He just supervised it. It came out infrequently.

Over time, I realized, although he let me write the occasional feature story, mostly he wanted me to sit in his office while he told stories or pretended to work. He kept his door open so executives passing by would see me sitting in his office. One time he offered to drive me to my car, which was parked several blocks away from the newspaper office, and then circled the block around the newspaper several times before actually taking me there. It began to feel very creepy, like he wanted someone to see me driving away with him. I felt like an ornament, not a contributing member of his staff. And in the year or more I contributed to his paper, he never did a thing to advance my career in any way. Finally, I told him I could no longer freelance for him. I didn't have the time.

Not long after, I applied for a job as writer/editor for the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board newsletter. That job would have changed my life. It was more money, more responsibility, and would have finally put me on the path to working in my chosen field. Without it, I spent another 15 years lanquishing in secretarial and assistant type jobs. I felt the interview had gone very well. When I didn't hear anything, I called and not only was I told I didn't get it, I was told why -- which is very unusual. Usually they just say another candidate was a better fit. One of my references said I had a "chip on my shoulder."

I was shocked, disappointed, chastised, and knew immediately which reference it was. For years, I slumped under the burden of that, and only today, three decades later, have I realized that although he meant that as a damning insult to ensure I didn't benefit from leaving him, it was actually a virture. It meant even at my young age, I felt confident in my ability. I felt I could do more and deserved to do more. I was too good to flirt with an aging old man and massage his ego. I felt I could stand on my own without a society college pedigree or trafficking in sex and drugs. I didn't need Affirmative Action to get a leg up.

But obviously I needed something, and that was the confidence to not let that man's comment rock my confidence like it did. I vowed I would go to his funeral and give him the evil eye in his casket, but it took him another 20 years to die, and by then I didn't care. Nobody did. Despite his illustrious career as an editor-terror through the 1950s and early part of the '60s, he barely got a mention in his own paper when he died.

I lived with that chip for just as long, realizing too late that it was actually the best thing about me.

Why Men Break Your Heart

There’s no glossing over it. Being abandoned by a man is a hard thing, and it’s bad for months. You can get through it, though. Sometimes you look back and see the worst of it was just a bridge that got you to a good place you never imagined you could reach. At least, that’s been my experience. But it’s a gut-wrenching trip over that bridge.

I have been thinking about this again lately because I've been close to three women in the past few years who were all abandoned with little to no advance warning and left reeling. 

This is the thing. You may think everything is fine, but it's not. The reason you don't know is because the other one is waiting, waiting for the new person to come along who will catch them so they can walk out of their old life right into the new one without a single day of feeling lost and alone. The only problem is your crying and hysterics as they go out the door. What's the problem? "We haven't been happy in a long time, and you know it."

I don’t understand this mysterious “happiness” people always think they are missing, like it’s out there someplace, but there it is. Men are really guility of this a lot. They will stay with you, eating your food, letting you pay their bills and clean all around them, until they find the new woman, and then they go. They won't leave their comfort zone until the next one is lined up and ready. 

***

This happens often around age 40. You think you only have one last chance at some elusive happiness and something snaps in your head and heart. You want to try to grab that mythical brass ring one more time. It’s not about the person you’re leaving at all, even though it’s going to be harder on them than anyone else.

***

The one who is left behind may think they desperately want to put the relationship back together, but it’s a cracked cup. Even if you get it back in the cupboard, it will always be a cracked cup. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life thinking if you don’t meet expectations, or keep him happy, he might leave again. Some women are willing to make the sacrifice, but who are you, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy? What are you getting out of this? It's not like you're keeping a cheating husband in order to maintain the title of First Lady of the Land or get maximum sympathy at a future state funeral. 

That's why the right thing to do is not to fight it. Try not to let him ever see you cry. Make it your goal to get back up and put your life back together without him. Yes, the old move-on cliche. You can do it. 

It’s hard to imagine a different life when you’re in the middle of the last one being torn asunder. But gradually, your eyes will perceive new pleasures on the horizon, and you will move steadily toward them. I go for months now without thinking about old heartbreaks. Most of the time, I can’t even remember what they looked like. It may feel really bad now – there’s no getting around that, so just focus on getting through.

***

There’s not much you can do when temptation meets up with general malaise. A man once told me: with men, it’s never the woman. It’s just the timing. There’s always other women making themselves available to your man. Sometimes they hit him at just the right moment, when he’s bored or doesn’t know where his life is going. Sometimes this other woman lets go of your man right away, and you never know anything even happened. And sometimes the other woman wraps a web around your man he can’t get out of, and now he’s stuck in a new drama. Like she’s pregnant. Or threatening suicide. Or has become a Fatal Attraction type that calls him at home or shows up at the door. You need her...and yeah, him, too, now...out of your life. This is their drama, not yours.

***

Yesterday, I was with a group of people and we were talking about our dads. Every person at the table's dad had done the same thing. Some had waited until our moms died. Some had waited until the kids were at least in high school or older, and then they met someone new. And in every single case, the new wife or girlfriend and her family totally absorbed our dads. Our dads became less invested in their own children. His money -- our inheritance -- started going out the window toward the needs of the new wife or girlfriend and her kids. And when all these dads died, all their money disappeared with them. Some people at the table were still really upset and trying to fight the new wife or girlfriend, but I can only shrug. Dads are men. They abandon their spouses, their children, for the new ones. Whatever the reason. For "chemistry." For "happiness." To feel young again. They leave behind a lot of hurt and are mystified that no one understands. It makes perfect sense to them. 

***

I can empathize with the pain. The most recent victim invested five years in her relationship, but there were signs. Neither one would give up their apartments to share one. They kept their safe houses the whole time. They went through a lot of hard times together, but still kept this wall of noncommitment. Then she came down with a routine, but communicable, ailment and they didn't see each other for just one week to avoid his catching it. That was all it took. The new woman, who magically appeared at the right place at just the right time, has Angelina Jolie-like powers -- beauty, intelligence, a direction in life. If I can comfort the abandoned one, all I can say is there's no fighting this kind of enemy, the Super Other Woman. Men are powerless against them. Your only hope is she will tire of him quickly, but then why in the world would you want him back? Better to regroup. Climb out of the rut and shake it off. I like both these people, but they both need more than they had with each other. 

Isn't It Romantic

When I decided to get married for the third time in 2001, according to statistics, it was not a popular option. More and more couples in America were opting just to live together. People advised me not to do it. Our tax refunds would take a beating. There was no real financial benefit to it. That there’s actually a penalty made me very reluctant.

A few weeks after that, 9/11 happened, and my unemployment check got raised an extra $100 a week and extended because the government thought the economy was going to take a dive. But I got an old part-time job back that November, and the following January, I got a call out of the blue for a second part-time job, which has never happened to me before, and that one turned into full-time, and I still work at the same place, 10 years later, which is the longest I have ever worked at the same place in my entire life.

A few weeks after that, 9/11 happened, and my unemployment check got raised an extra $100 a week and extended because the government thought the economy was going to take a dive. But I got an old part-time job back that November, and the following January, I got a call out of the blue for a second part-time job, which has never happened to me before, and that one turned into full-time, and I still work at the same place, 10 years later, which is the longest I have ever worked at the same place in my entire life.

But I had seen this episode of “E.R.” about two lesbians in the emergency room. One had had a stroke and her partner said she wouldn’t want extraordinary medical intervention. But her partner didn’t have a legal right to make any decisions for her. The doctors had to contact an estranged brother and get his permission, and he said to try to resuscitate her, so the poor lesbian partner had to watch while they entubated her lover until she died.

Yikes. I had an estranged brother, and I don’t want him making any decisions about me. I also had an adult son who lived in New York and I really hadn't had much contact with in a decade. I had a father living in North Carolina who I hadn't seen in 20 years. The idea that my boyfriend of four years wouldn’t be able to say, “Don’t tube her until she dies…”

Isn’t this romantic? Is this how you plan a wedding?

Why don’t you just give him power of attorney, someone suggested. Because a marriage license was $33 in Hanover County, and a legal document drawn up by a lawyer was more.

Besides, we had been together five years, and I felt like a silly Cougar woman still introducing him as my boyfriend. Women my age, with heavy Miss Clairol habits, shouldn’t have boyfriends. It sounded addled. It would be even stupider introducing him as my legal guardian.

“It’s time we thought about getting married,” I told him. “What’s the least we can do and still satisfy your family?”

He had never been married, and his family likes the weddings. The last cousin wedding we attended was at a mansion you could rent out for weddings and receptions. There was an oil painting of the bride in a room with bowls of shrimp on ice all around it. All the napkins had the couple’s names on them and the wedding date. Everyone got a miniature plastic wedding cake. When you pulled the tiny bride-and-groom top off, it was a bubble blower. You blow bubbles after the departing couple instead of throwing messy rice, which kills birds or something like that.

There was a free bar, guys in tuxes cooking made-to-order omelets on hot plates, and a deejay playing records. People got loaded and did the Macarena and the Electric Slide around a pool full of floating floral arrangements.

My 80-year-old dad, who sent me $500 when I eloped at age 20, and $500 again when I eloped again at age 22, wasn't going to pony up for a big wedding now. I’d rather have a car anyway, if he wanted to pay for something, which he did not. No one in my family has ever seen me get married, and I’d like to keep it that way. They never approve and they’re always right, so let’s not get started.

My boyfriend said his family would like to see him get married, even if I didn't want anyone to see me get married. We could go to a magistrate at the courthouse, but the immediate family and a grandmother had to be invited. The immediate family also included his father and his new wife.

Damn it. That meant I needed a dress and a ring now because people have to see something. License, magistrate’s fee, dress and a ring. Would that be enough of a show to justify their attending, but not big enough to make my family think I shafted them on the invitations? This was getting complicated, and expensive. I picked a Tuesday night in July at the historic Hanover Courthouse, which also happened to be the fifth anniversary of our first date.

Soon after the decision was made, at a bar where my boyfriend's band was playing, he stood up and said, “We have an announcement…” So now I had to invite the band and their dates. And all his friends.

Looking back, from the perspective of 11 years later, I have a lot of regrets. I regret not actually doing a better job of the wedding and inviting all my estranged family, what few friends I had, and yes, the people at work, even though most of them would not have attended. It's the thought that counts. My wedding video doesn't show anyone at all from my side, and consequently, seems all about the groom. Not that that's a bad thing. It was his first marriage, after all.

I regret the dress I picked. Finding a dress was next to impossible for my size and a late afternoon wedding in the middle of summer when you are really too old to go strapless or have bare arms, and you no longer have a waist. I didn't want to spend a lot of money. I ended up with an off-white sheath with a full-length vest over it and a white Jackie Kennedy-like hat that I decorated with plastic flowers and ribbons. My bangs were too short. You really need to spend more time than I did on the dress and the hair because you will never be photographed so much in your life unless you become a movie star. I didn't hire a photographer, but everyone there brought their camera and sent me pictures.

And then to my horror...I saw the dress again on the mother-of-the-bride in a slideshow of a redneck wedding held at a Waffle House west of Roanoke. The slideshow won some kind of journalism photography award and was in an exhibit. Every woman in the wedding party was obese.

Occupied by Nail Salons

I don’t know how my parents felt about people of Japanese or German descent after World War II. I did notice that my mother was still angry at Gen. MacArthur even as he lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda. I couldn’t figure out why, being a child, but years later I knew I wasn’t going to feel too bad when Gen. Westmoreland died. He sent a lot of boys my age to their deaths, and some of it may have been because of career or aggrandizement rather than the necessity of war. Why do generals tend to die in bed?

So I feel a little odd to see so many Vietnamese restaurants in my neighborhood now, or that the most popular beer joint is called Mekong. This was once the enemy. Now it seems like we have been occupied. And the biggest occupier is the nail salons.

I am still looking for the perfect salon. Ever since I became addicted to shellac manicures and the occasional pedicure a year ago, I have been going to a different salon every time, but it’s hard to tell that it’s different. No one speaks English at any of them. Sometimes I ask where they’re from, and inevitably it’s Vietnam. I never hear Thailand, where I lived for two years during the height of the war, or China, or Taiwan, or Malaysia, or Japan, or Korea, or any other Asian nation. Or any Hispanic nation. Or European country.  It is always Vietnam. Why does this one country have a monopoly on nail salons in my town?

A big part of why I have not picked a favorite salon and settled in yet is because I can’t tell a difference. I don’t know what any of the women are saying to each other – and they talk continuously to each other in their native language while working on customers – so I have no sense of who they are, what they are interested in, what they think. I have no anecdotes to tell my husband when I get home. I hear nothing at the salon – nothing I understand anyway. I have not bonded with any of the technicians. I especially don’t care for having the man in the salon – and there’s usually one – do my nails.

The prices tend to be very close from place to place. The service is identical. Pedicure chairs and foot baths are all the same. I  request that my cuticles not be cut, but they don’t understand me. It becomes too hard to explain and throws them off their routine. As a teen living in Thailand, I got 50 cent manicures and 75 cent pedicures, the latter included having my feet and legs scrubbed with pumice stones up to my knees. But they also had a bad habit of cutting my toenails into points, which resulted in ingrown toenails and visits to the Army medical hospital for painful toe surgery.

Since restarting pedicures, I have developed a mild nail fungus on one toe, which makes me wonder how thoroughly the foot basins are washed, or hands, or tools, after each customer, or what gets into my toe when I shuffle out in those flimsy salon flip flops because my big toes take half a day to dry? I never had toe fungus before I started getting pedicures again.

Is the economy of Vietnamese nail salons like having Apple products made in China? If Americans ran nail salons, would manicures be too expensive for most women? My technician chatted to me a lot yesterday, her eyes twinkling. She spoke some English, but still I couldn’t make out much of it, so we didn’t bond, although I appreciated the other tech in the salon sitting beside me and rubbing my arms affectionately as my nails dried. I could see why so many soldiers were attracted to Asian women when they were in service, and at the same time were able to leave them behind. It feels good for the moment, but tomorrow’s girl is just as good as yesterday’s, and the relationship is comforting, but brief and forgotten.

All Politics Explained

I read two interesting articles after the election. One said all the television ads and direct mail pieces made no difference at all. The most effective way to campaign was word-of-mouth, identifying community leaders and creating a herd mentality. For Obama's people, this meant sending community organizers to barbershops and beauty salons to talk up their candidate, leave brochures and posters, and train the shop workers to talk to their customers and encourage them to vote.

The other article was about Karl Rove's SuperPac, and despite its millions of dollars in funding that underwrote attack ads in a dozen campaigns, its success rate was 1 percent.

It appears that all these super PACs are just job creation mechanisms, creating jobs for the organizers of the PACs, that is, and the people who claim they are political strategists, the Josh Lymans and Toby Zieglers of the world. They subtract a great deal of money from the rich and the corporations, pocket some of it, and then inject that money into the media. Television and radio stations collected a bonanza in sales, as well as whoever printed all the oversized postcards I received in the mail.

We try to make politics and the art of winning mysterious and complicated, but I think it's very simple. It's all emotional.

In my lifetime, I can explain how every president got elected by emotion.

Eisenhower beat Stevenson because he was Gen. Eisenhower. We had just come out of a devastating world war, quickly followed by Korea. We were at odds with another superpower, Russia. We felt we needed a general, not the effete, divorced Stevenson. Curiously, the Democrats nominated him again in 1956 to be beaten by the same Gen. Eisenhower under the same world conditions.

Kennedy beat Nixon because he was young and handsome, and Nixon was sweaty and shifty looking, and after eight years of Republican rule, we were all excited for something new and different.

Johnson beat Goldwater because Kennedy was assassinated and we felt bad. Plus Goldwater looked like the 1950s, not that Johnson seemed any more modern. Plus Johnson made us feel like Goldwater might launch a nuclear bomb for no good reason.

Nixon beat Humphrey because Humphrey was a bigger joke than Nixon and supported the Vietnam War, which nobody liked anymore, and the Democrats really had too many guys in the field and split up their base. Vietnam was perceived as the Democrat's war, which was a problem. Robert Kennedy would have beat Nixon, but there was that issue with also being assassinated. Nixon didn't actually get us out of the war fast enough because he needed it to win reelection. McGovern was too liberal and too bald, and the real threat to Nixon, Ted Kennedy, although he was not assassinated, he did leave a woman to drown at Chappaquiddick, so the Democrats were too embarrassed to nominate him.

After having no choice but to vote for Nixon, we then got rid of him another way and ended up with the bland Gerald Ford, who was only vice president because Spiro Agnew was a crook. Jimmy Carter beat Ford because Ford pardoned Nixon, and was also bland, although we all liked Betty a lot.

Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter because of the Iranian Hostage Crisis, which was embarrassing to us and launched Ted Koppel's career as the host of Nightline, which started out as a nightly special report on the Iranian Hostage Crisis. That's how embarrassed we were. Plus, Reagan was tall. Carter was not. At the debates, Carter looked like a midget. We needed a tall Hollywood guy to stand up to crazies like Ayatollahs.

Reagan beat Mondale because Mondale was a joke and had bags under his eyes. Not very Hollywood. The Democrats had nothing taller than Reagan to offer, and Gary Hart couldn't stand much scrutiny due to his sketchy past and womanizing. He was Bill Clinton, but without any political smarts or likeability.

George Bush beat Dukakis because of the goodwill of the Reagan years, and Dukakis' name was Dukakis. He also took a silly picture wearing a helmet and riding in a tank that political cartoonists loved, and he didn't react to a crazy question during the debates about what if his wife was raped. Then there was that thing about pardoning murderer Willie Horton. This was when political action committees actually did seem to work, and the politics of today was created by the evil Lee Atwater, the diabolical spiritual father of Karl Rove. If you haven't seen the documentary, "Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story," you need to. Atwater was punished by God, but successfully destroyed modern American politics before he was smited.

Bill Clinton beat George Bush because Lee Atwater was too sick to work his evil magic again, and Clinton had that Kennedyish charm. After 12 years of Republican rule, we were ready for the new and different. Plus Clinton had the Democratic version of Lee Atwater in James Carville. With Gore as his running mate, the "Double Bubba" ticket seemed charming.

Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole because Dole was a joke, a worn out politico who always seemed uncomfortable, and everything seemed to be going good under Clinton, so why change? Dole was a WWII veteran and Clinton got a deferment from the Vietnam War, but that didn't mean as much in the 1990s and was a poor strategy.

Bush beat Gore because Gore was not very charming, Bush had Karl Rove working evil magic, and there was that whole sex scandal around Clinton that somehow tarnished Gore. And yet Gore still won the election, but the Republicans pulled shenanigans in Florida.

Cheney beat Kerry because....oh wait a minute. Technically Bush was the president even though Cheney was really the president. Bush beat Kerry because of 9/11 and all the terrorists, and he made an impromptu comment at Ground Zero that made us think he was a fighter, but actually anything encouraging anyone said at that place in time would have seemed encouraging and inspiring. So we got into another war, and somehow, even though Kerry had been in Vietnam and Bush had not, Kerry was swiftboated to appear cowardly. That whole swiftboat thing was a work of evil genius. Plus, Kerry was married to a rich lady with ketchup money, and somehow Democrats need to be a little poorer than that, a little more like you and me.

Obama beat McCain because what were the Republicans thinking with that old guy candidate who looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy with a trophy wife and a vice presidential candidate who seemed handpicked to be ridiculed by the media and comedians. Plus Obama was young and kind of black, and different, and had that whole hope and change thing going and a cool looking poster, and any Democrat after Bush could have won, really. People who seldom voted, like minorities and young people, voted.

And I think that's what happened again. The minorities and young came back to the polls. Women were somehow convinced they were going to lose their right to have abortions, and that was more important to them at this moment in time than jobs and the economy. (When they're 10 and 20 years older, they will not care about that as much, trust me. They will figure out how not to get pregnant when they don't want to be pregnant. They will want a job more.) The Republicans, instead of nominating someone equally young and handsome and full of false promises of hope and change, picked the most plastic of candidates, another millionaire we can't identify with, who didn't even drink soda, for goodness' sakes, because of religious beliefs. Who can identify with a guy who won't drink a Coke?

And that explains all politics.

I Need to Figure Out Religion

I need to figure out religion. I’ve gone to Protestant churches and studied for a year to be a Catholic, only to come up $800 short when they told me I couldn’t take communion unless I paid a fee to have my marriage annulled. I also had to fill out a long questionnaire that asked embarrassingly blunt questions about my sex life, which was going to be reviewed by a celibate junior priest. I rethought that and went back and retrieved it after turning it in. That ended my life as a Catholic, as much as I enjoyed the holy water and rosaries and crossing myself. And the priestly frocks and big hats and pots of smoke they would waft around. And the kneeling benches. And the candle lighting. And the statues.

The Baptists had none of that, only hymns that sounded like dirges, long, drowsy sermons, and a never-ending need to build yet another annex, so here comes the collection plate again. My most memorable moment in church was hearing the minister fuss about how hard it was to raise money for the new annex, yet if a storm came along and blew away every car in the parking lot, next Sunday it would be full of cars again. We’d find the money for that.

I was raised to believe every word in the Bible was true, that this was the true and accurate story of religion, that Revelations was what was really going to happen and my role at this point in time was to wait for it. Like a good Christian, I questioned none of it. That would be blasphemy.

Then I met a man I greatly admired who thought my acceptance of all this was tantamount to believing the cartoon animals and inanimate objects in Disney movies were sentient beings. Religion, he said, was just another story, made up. We often spent our time together debating it, and I have to say he made sense. My whole defense was built on a foundation of faith. That’s what I was told and I have to believe it.

It’s been 20 years now since I last talked to him. He died a decade ago, still a relatively young man. But he made a lasting impression and I still struggle with the fanciful stories of my youth sitting on hard pews and wonder what the truth really is. I mean, why did God pick 0 B.C. for Jesus to be born when we’ve gone more than another 2,000 years since then? And there's years of human history before 0 B.C. Thousands of years. Millions of years if you believe the evolutionists. What’s with the timing? Why give the savior of mankind a mere 33 years to make an impression during a time when there was no Internet or TV? There wasn’t even a printing press. That’s putting a lot of trust in word of mouth and scribes that might have their own agendas and are scratching it all out on parchments they hide in caves.

Today I finally figured out there is no hell or eternal damnation. A casual mention on Twitter about a verse in Matthew referencing the resurrection of the saints after the crucifixation…and how none of that makes sense…took me on an Internet search where I finally found the first plausible explanation of why a merciful God would condemn anyone to hell, especially people in isolated areas who have never heard about Jesus. This website said when we die, we are asleep. We are asleep, the good and evil both. We sleep until the day of judgment, and then those who believed are granted everlasting life, and those who did not are condemned to the (perhaps metaphorical) lake of fire, not to burn through eternity – because that would still be an everlasting life – but just to be burned into the nothingness of ashes. Gone. Oblivious. That seems a far more kinder eternity, and one most non-Christians believe they are going to anyway. Nothing. Fire, after all, destroys and goes out, it doesn’t burn endlessly. When your house burns down to ashes, you will not find your sofa still sitting there.

Of course, now I have to think about Jesus’ words to the thief on the neighboring cross that “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” Paradise is not sleep. (Unless you're the parent of a newborn.) And today as in literally today? So much to figure out.

My Lame Whitney Houston Story

In 1992, my life was between acts. I was between marriages, between jobs, teaching myself this whole new computer graphics thing that was changing the world. I was sad and depressed and things were still two or three years away from beginning to work out again.

I occasionally went to movies alone, mostly romantic comedies, for distraction.  In 1992, I went to see “The Body Guard” at the theater closest to my apartment. It was a two-screen movie house in the parking lot of a shopping strip on Midlothian Turnpike, not far from the channel 12 tower, far from upscale. That whole part of the highway was going downhill fast as businesses fled west.

I was not a fan of Whitney Houston. I sort of liked Kevin Costner, almost entirely for “Bull Durham.” I had never been to a mainly black movie theater before, and realized once I got in the lobby, that’s where I was.

The first thing I noticed was the food. Unlike other theaters, this one didn’t mind if you brought in your own food. The usher didn’t stop a single person. The theatergoers had bags of food, buckets of chicken, even coolers on wheels with food and beverages in them. There was even beer! They brought children and babies. The children ran loose through the theater throughout the movie, as if it was a McDonaldland play area. The babies cried.

The second thing I noticed was no one settled down in their seats once the movie began. Throughout the showing, people were up and walking around and talking. They talked to each other in loud voices. They talked to the screen. They ate meals. It was a regular picnic with just a movie incidentally playing in the background. I tried to follow the story, but there were so many distractions. This was a cultural difference for me. I don’t know if there are any theaters in town like this anymore. I haven’t experienced this since.

Where I go to movies, the only illegal food that gets in has to fit in a purse. People with babies and children are reported to the ushers for eviction unless it’s a children's movie. And talkers are stared down or get their seats kicked.

I remember nothing about “The Body Guard” plot now, and when I saw it on TV recently, it was all new to me. That's how distracting that theater was. It's not there anymore, and that part of town is still waiting to be rehabilitated.