The movies on allowance day.

Queues winding round corners, making the feast inside even more fantastic because access to it was so difficult. I no longer remember everything I saw, but the emotions, the excitement, the smell are still vivid. The sound of a bell, the light slowly dimming. Eyes tight shut, the more so for the hands pressed against them; and when finally you looked again, the miracle was already there on the screen. The pictures, the flight from reality, the world of dreams: experiences and people I believed would become part of my everyday life in the future. Tragedies so great that there was still a lump in the throat many hours later. Wonders so great that my feet did not touch the ground all the way home.

~ Liv Ullman, Changing (Knopf, 1976)

Notes:

• Quote: the distance between two doors
• Photo: Only Old Photography: Hiroshi Sugitomo: Movie Theatre -Trylon Theatre, NYC, 1976.