The Southern Screen
When I was growing up, during those long desert years before I looked old enough to sneak into bars, movies were the thing. No, they were everything. First, there was the drive-in on the highway and the Paramount downtown, which had once been the local opera house—when it was misguidedly demolished in the late sixties, it was rumored that jewels and actual tiaras were discovered in the rubble. After that came the Plaza and the Cinema, which, excitingly, housed two separate theaters. My best friend, Jessica, and I never missed a weekend in one or both, which meant that we saw pretty much every film released in the 1970s—sometimes two or three times, depending on how long they lingered in town. We were variously in love with Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Dennis Hopper, James Coburn, and the dude who played Billy Jack. But we would watch pretty much anybody in anything, including the rats in , a movie I still can’t believe I let Jessica con me into sitting all the way through. My nightmares about rats continued to visit me until I was in my
