Since we’ve asked people to share memories of my parents, I’ve been thinking about what I would share if asked for the same thing. Here’s a spattering of items about each of them.
I can’t recall going to a movie theater with Mom after elementary school; I think the last movie we saw together in a theater was E.T.. (If I had to guess, it was either because she didn’t like sitting still, possibly because of her arthritis, or not being allowed to talk. “No, Mom, I don’t know what’s going to happen in this new episode of Star Trek. I haven’t seen it before.”) We didn’t see a lot of movies in theaters in elementary school, so it was fairly memorable.
In middle school, my sister and I established a fairly solid movie habit; one of the two single-screen theaters in Antigua had double-showings at the weekend, so we could spend all of either Saturday or Sunday afternoon watching somewhat recent movies. (I will note that the pairings were not always appropriate, such as a He-Man movie followed by Revenge of the Nerds. Kids movies were dubbed; everything else had subtitles.) At some point before that, while staying with a local family in a neighborhood with many kids our age, we decided to convince Mom to pay for 5 or 6 of us to see Jaws. We weren’t dragging her along, we were just hitting her up for the money, which at the time was probably $3 or $4 for the entire group. As the second-youngest member of that group, I spent a decent amount of the movie peeking out from behind the chair in front of me, along with the youngest member. (I have since rewatched it with less hiding, as well as reading the book in English and Spanish.)
Dad, on the other hand, enjoyed movies in theaters, but was fairly selective about what movies he saw. As an example of something worth seeing on the big screen, we saw Dances with Wolves together once I was back in Miami for school. He saw The Crying Game before I did, I think while we were hosting my sister’s bachelorette party at the house. Near the beginning of middle school, I recall there was a movie he and I both wanted to see – Amadeus – but my sister wasn’t interested, so we compromised and saw something else at that opportunity. A month later, we were all in Guatemala and looked for somewhere we could see it. (Back when you checked movie times in the newspaper!) With only two single-screen theaters in town, it wasn’t playing where we could walk to it, so we caught a bus to Guatemala City, then another bus to the appropriate zone of the city for a theater with multiple screens that was still showing it. And then had to reverse that process to get home in time for dinner.