1962 Cleveland Circle Massachusetts

Margaret Homans
Born 1952
Cleveland Circle, Massachusetts
Interviewed on Feb 4, 2026
by Soojin Park

Note: The following transcript has been edited for clarity

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“Okay, the first movie that I can remember seeing, I think, is Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence of Arabia. My family was not given to going to the movies, so chances are it was somebody else’s birthday party. Somebody’s mom must have driven me. But the experience of that enormous screen! I can still remember how overwhelming it was because we had a small television at home. I mean, in black and white. We’re talking about the 1950s.  I don’t know the date of the Lawrence of Arabia film. Let’s see… 

[We look up the film’s release date]

“Okay. It was 1962. Oh, wow. So, I was ten or nine. But still, it was just overwhelming. That huge screen. I can still remember the vastness of the desert. Because of course, I’d never seen a desert either. And then the makeup with which the producers made a bullet wound on… was it Peter O’Toole or somebody else? I can’t even remember. But I had never seen a bullet wound, so that was really shocking, too, because it was red in the middle and then it was sort of ruffled around the edges. And that was just horrifying. The illusion of violence. Those are the things that I remember about [the film]. And of course, I remember that Peter O’Toole was very dashing and that there were camels and all kinds of things happened. 

“I couldn’t say what the movie was actually about. I think I was just overwhelmed by the vastness of the visual imagery. If there was a plot, I didn’t take it in. It’s those images and the experience of having nothing else in your visual field that was just so novel. And I think it was on a special screen. I think it was a wider screen than normal movies. Like IMAX today. 

“I don’t think [any concessions] were involved. I don’t remember anything about popcorn or candy or anything. Did they even do popcorn in those days? I’m sure they did. Did they? I don’t know. I’m not sure. [The theater] might have been the Circle Theater in Cleveland Circle in the outskirts of Boston, Massachusetts. It was the nearby theater. There weren’t multiplexes then, I don’t think. And see, because it was 1962, that could be a totally fake first memory.”

SP: But isn’t that how memories work? 

MH: I suppose it is, yes. 

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Margaret Homans is currently a professor of English and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale University.