Page 170 - Demo

%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK158 Jack Fritscherits own ray of light through the darkened seminary auditorium, over our heads, down the middle to the screen. The movie actors%u2019 mouths had to work around a hole where some wild boy had shoved a chair through the grainy canvas. The movies were old, scratched, and wholesome.The Mudlark, a movie about Queen Victoria, broke off flapping repeatedly during its three reels that had to be switched by hand. The lights came up and the boys moaned and I couldn%u2019t be inside the movie any more.The sound went out of synchronization. The frames stuck and burned and the black-and-white image on screen turned orange and melted from the center out as we%u2019d all boo. The movies were rated by the Legion of Decency, but the decency of seminarians required even stricter watch.Whenever anything slightly suggestive came on the screen, one of the priests held a filing card across the projector lens. I always wondered if he watched the scene on the card like his own private peep show. We snickered our first years at every carded scene, when the screen went dark, or almost dark, and the top of actors%u2019 heads bobbed around, and the dialog continued, strident through our one-string-and-tin-can-loudspeaker tethered on a long cord and set under the screen.In our later years, we laughed up our cassock sleeves because the priests always told us that we were adults who should be acting like adults and then they whipped out the filing cards. At least I was able to retrieve a strip of twelve frames that broke off one reel and save them in my shoe box. The movie was The Left Hand of God with Humphrey Bogart posing as a priest in China. The thought of someone posing as a priest intrigued me and I studied those twelve frames of Bogart%u2019s face over and over, holding them up to the light.Movies at Misery were far from glamorous: no marquee to stand under, no coming attractions, no popcorn. Most boys filed into the auditorium in bleary-eyed compulsory attendance at movies I called %u201cvitamin-enriched%u201d because they were supposed to be good for us. I had hopes for each movie, but the priests succeeded in making every viewing a season in purgatory. When we once saw a movie about convicts watching a movie in prison, the movie prisoners acted the same way toward the screen we did. I laughed out loud. I knew the screen was a mirror. I realized that whatever was on screen was really about life, the way novels and plays and art were really about life.Sometimes the movie provoked discussion afterwards, with all the boys standing in hallways, the older boys smoking one last cigarette in the last few minutes before night prayers and the Grand Silence.