1954 New York, New York

Cathy Lachicotte Kern

1950

New York City, New York

Interviewed on 2/9/22

by Josie Chan

My first movie was called A Stranger in Paradise. It was based on the play, Kismet. I was five years old, and it was in New York City with my grandmother. I had just come back from a visit to Spain to see her—she lived in Pennsylvania but we met up in New York—and I went back to Spain after. I do remember the song, and I can still sing it—like, I can still hum it! What I remember about the movie was that it was so larger than life…and—it was a musical—and so there were people dancing and singing, and the costumes…I was basically just standing there with my mouth open. I was in awe of the whole thing, I couldn’t believe it. Of course I’ve loved films ever since. I believe the movie was in color, it was 1954 or 55. I don’t remember what theater it was though, I was just visiting my grandmother and didn’t know much about New York. Now, I might have a wrong memory, but the movie kind of reminded me of when I see the Nutcracker, when you see the part that’s Arabian. Every time I see the Nutcracker and I see Arabian, my brain goes back to A Stranger in Paradise, so I think it must’ve been set somewhere in the Middle East. Actually the movie might be called Kismet, rather than A Stranger in Paradise. I have never watched it since then, and I never went to watch the play version, but I know—I still listen to the songs. I was so young at the time that I don’t remember more about the experience, but I can tell you much more about the next experience I had at the cinema!

So, when I was nine, we left Spain—I didn’t go to the movies at all in Spain—and when we left Spain, we moved to a small military base in Utah. The base had a movie theater, and we could ride our bikes to the movie theater. So I would ride my bike with my friends and…the movie cost ten cents to see it, and we could buy a small bottle of coke—you know those small bottles of coke that are so cute? A small bottle of coke from the machine cost five cents, and they gave us popcorn for free. Yes, we had a little bag of popcorn that we got for free with our five cent cokes, so for fifteen cents—which is probably about five dollars now—you could go see a movie. And that was in like 1959 to 1960. My favorite candy from the movie confectionery was always, always Junior Mints, though.

It was so much fun…so independent that we could just ride our bikes and go to the movie theater. My parents never went with me to the theater—they were so excited that my friends and I could go out and do things on our own. But they would make me earn the money to go to the movies, so I started babysitting. When I was in fourth grade, there was a family that lived a couple of houses down from me, and they had toddlers, three year-olds and four year-olds, so I would go over there after school and play with the kids so the mom could do other things like cook dinner. So she would pay me to play with her kids while she cooked dinner, and I used that money to go to the movies.

We did Saturday matinees, so they did movies in the middle of the day for kids, and movies for adults at night. It was a very small theater—do you know the Clay Theatre on Filmore Street (San Francisco)? With four seats on one side of the aisle and four seats on the other? It was very much like that…we always liked to sit in the front, so we would sit in the first three or four rows. Saturday afternoons were never crowded and there would just be a couple of kids in there. I lived on a military base, so you had to live on the military base in order to go and your parents had to give you permission to go. And there were other parents there with their kids, but my parents always let me go with my friends. They used to play Rin Tin Tin, which was a dog show—it was like a TV show but they did it in the movie theater, so we could go watch Rin Tin Tin every Saturday. 

I tried to go to the theater as often as I could. Before we had a TV, I was already a film screen maniac. I was probably thirteen or fourteen when I went to my first large movie theater. It was in Vallejo, California—because that was where we moved when we left Utah—and I went with my boyfriend.