Narrative Essay on Movies

The Sanctuary of the Silver Screen

The smell of the Orpheum Theater was a complex bouquet of salt, artificial butter, and the slightly metallic scent of old air conditioning. To a ten year old boy, it was the smell of possibility. My father used to take me there every Saturday afternoon, a ritual that felt less like a hobby and more like a weekly pilgrimage to a secular cathedral. The lobby was a cavern of faded red velvet and brass railings that had lost their luster decades ago, but under the dim, amber glow of the chandeliers, everything looked like gold.

I remember the first time I felt the true power of the medium. We were sitting in the fifth row, close enough that the screen filled my entire field of vision. The lights dimmed, not all at once, but in a slow, graceful fade that signaled the world of the street was being replaced by the world of the imagination. As the projector hummed to life, a beam of light cut through the dust motes dancing in the air, and suddenly, I was no longer a skinny kid in suburban Ohio. I was an explorer, a hero, a witness to the impossible. That afternoon, movies stopped being mere entertainment; they became the lens through which I would eventually learn to view the world.