1951 Queens, New York

Ruth Yeazell
Born 1947
Queens, New York
Interviewed on 31st January 2022
by Tan Yi Tseung

I think the best I can remember, it would have been the original Walt Disney, Cinderella. I was quite young. What I can’t tell you is exactly how young I was. I went back, frankly, and looked up what the [release] date of that movie is. And it’s 1950 I think, in which case I would have been three years old. I doubt if I was quite that young. So I don’t know whether it came round again to the theater. I mean, if you’d asked me to guess, I would have said more like, four or five, but I don’t know. It certainly might have been a year after it came out. And in all honesty, and I’ll say this about some of the other things I remember about the episode, it’s very hard for me to sort out. I know this happened. But it’s very hard for me to sort out what I actually remember from the fact that for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, it became a story my mother told. So you know, as a lot of discovering early memories like that goes, you don’t know whether you actually remember it or you remember your parents telling you about it.

We lived in Far Rockaway in Queens [New York], and the theater would have been in downtown Far Rockaway. So it was a local, little town, suburb theater. I think we would have driven [to the theater]. It was the theater that, insofar as I went to movies before we moved away when I was in 11th grade, all my conscious memories up till 11th grade are in that town. So [the theater] was kind of on the main street of the town. I can sort of visualize the marquee to some extent, on the outside [of] my mind’s eye. I certainly would get lost if I [hadn’t] been to the place. But I have a sort of vague, visceral feeling for where it was in space.

I think there was food sold in the theater, but I don’t think we would have eaten, and I don’t think my parents would have typically bought me food. I was going with my mother. I don’t think my father came. He wouldn’t have the patience for watching a Disney movie. I have a younger brother. But he would have been two or three, or one or two at the most. So he wouldn’t have been with us because he was a baby.

I was very attached to the story [of Cinderella]. And the reason my mother took me was I had already read the story of Cinderella. If you know what the so-called Golden Books were for little kids, I think I had some of those books, so I certainly knew the story of Cinderella and I wanted to go [to the movie]. However, the embarrassing thing, and the reason the story was told, is [that] on the one hand, I wanted to go. But on the other hand, by this point, I was watching Howdy Doody on television. Regularly. And it turns out that this overlapped, or I thought it was overlapping with Howdy Doody. So here’s my mother taking me, doing this special thing for me, which she thought I was really [going to] like, and I apparently kept saying, “is Howdy Doody on yet?” And that’s why the story was told, and I can imagine that I actually remember sitting in the theater, and worrying about that, and asking my mother. But I really, I’m just not sure whether that’s a real actual memory or what my mother complained about later.

I read the story before, but of course, it’s not accurate. The movie was an animation. So, I can visualize bits of it in my mind’s eye, almost. But first of all, of course, I’d probably seen clips later [in my life]. So, you know, I think I can sort of picture Cinderella, the glass slipper, and the fairy godmother, but I’m not very visual. My visual memories are extremely vague. But I think I have a sort of sense of that. But as I say, whether I got that from actually watching the film or the kind of tie-ins as we probably would now call them, I don’t know.

[In terms of the movie ticket,] even though my mother regarded this [experience] as special, I think she thought it was special because she arranged to do it and she bothered to take me, rather than because it was expensive. When I was a little bit older, I think I was using my allowance to go to the movies. But I don’t remember [going to the movie] being this huge expense, one way or the other.

I mean, it’s not that I continue to read fairy tales that much, but I think a certain kind of romantic plot had a great appeal to me. I mean, I wasn’t a tomboy. I would have gravitated toward those kinds of conventional little girl type of stories. I was certainly the kind of little girl who wanted to see Cinderella.