My Life at the Byrd

I see the Byrd Theatre is celebrating its 80th birthday on Oct. 18. As part of my job, I've taken a tour of the Byrd and seen the behind-the-scenes parts of it, upstairs, downstairs, under the stairs, behind the screen. I think there's actually a creek running through it on a lower level.

I don't go to the Byrd much because of the parking issue, and I don't go to movies much anyway, but I have three distinct memories of it.

The first memory is bad. I was there with a boyfriend watching -- I think -- a reissue of a Disney cartoon. He had his legs up against the back of the seat in front of us. He was over six feet tall and no one was sitting there, but this was in the very early 1970s and he had "hippie hair," so naturally the usher, an old man, had to come down the aisle and say something to him. And that started a squabble because the boyfriend, despite the hippie hair, was a two-year veteran of Vietnam combat and felt entitled, so there was ugliness and we were asked to leave. My first time in the Times-Dispatch was a letter to the editor complaining about the incident and defending my veteran boyfriend, who, it turned out, would pull stunts like this the whole time I knew him and it would become indefensible. We never went back there together.

The second memory is the first time I saw "Gone with the Wind," which was also in the early 1970s because my date was my son (spawn of that indefensible boyfriend who had since deserted) and he was a toddler. It's a long movie and he got bored and started crawling around on the floor, and much to my horror, I discovered he was eating the old candy he was finding on the floor. He came up from one crawl with Good & Plentys stuck in his hair. The rest of the time he actually watched the movie, especially in the beginning when Scarlet is getting dressed to go to parties. He piped up loud enough for everyone to hear, "She gots big underwear!"

The next memory was sitting through "Three Weddings and a Funeral" in a crowded theater in a state of shock. It was the first time in a year I was there without Frank. Pretty much all Frank and I did for the nine months we hung out together was go to the Byrd. We saw everything that played there, good or bad (mostly bad). I mean, everything. I vaguely remember the "Last of the Mohicans" and some movie with Sara Jessica Parker and Nicholas Cage and lots of Elvis impersonators in Las Vegas. Then Frank was gone. He found true love and that was the end of our friendship for all useful purposes, and I was numb with grief. My new drinking buddy Lisa and one of her one-night stands wanted to go to the Byrd and talked me into it, but being inside it without Frank was such a shock to my system, I could not focus on the movie. There was just this roaring of grief in my head the whole time. Years later, I finally "saw" "Three Weddings and a Funeral" on TV and didn't remember any of it. I don't remember ever going to see a film there again, even though my future husband and I lived two blocks from the theater for three years.