My mother claims to have been the very first person in line at its very first showing in Chicago, at the Chicago Theater, nine o’clock on a spring morning, her best friend, Eleanor, second in line.
Mildred and Eleanor, 1939.
They were telephone operators, working the night shift at Bell on Washington Boulevard, and that morning, instead of going home, decided to go see Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in the Old South.
They had to wait an hour for the ticket booth to open, but it was a fine spring morning—I picture laundered-looking sunlight on the tall buildings—and they chatted and shared an egg salad sandwich.
My mother doesn’t remember where they got the sandwich, but she said it was delicious, eating it outside like that, right on the street.
Meanwhile the line behind them kept growing, until it went all the way down the block and around the corner. Then finally a girl appeared in the ticket booth—looking bored, chewing a wad of gum—and my mother stepped up, money in hand: “One, please.”
Holding her ticket, she waited for Eleanor.
Then Mildred and Eleanor walked together through the immaculate, red-carpeted lobby without stopping for popcorn. An usher wearing white gloves was opening a pair of large doors—just for them, it seemed.
They entered the dim theater and headed bouncily down the tilted aisle, all the way down, and sat themselves in the middle of the very first row, shiny black purses in their laps, heads back, waiting for the curtain to open:
There was a curtain.
And when, at last, it began to slide open I picture my mother clutching Eleanor’s arm.
Thirty-five years later on a rainy Sunday afternoon I saw it at a little theater off Clark Street, with a bad hangover and nothing better to do. Sitting in the very last row, feet up, I counted eighteen other people scattered around, like at a porn flick.
There wasn’t a curtain.
I fell asleep during a gala affair at Scarlett’s cousin’s house. Two and a half hours later an usher shook me by the arm, telling me the movie was over, telling me I had to leave.
Out on the sidewalk the rain had stopped and the sun was shining horribly bright.