I Heard It Through the Tape, Mime

Paramount sent me this photo from "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa." The image appears to have been taken inside a tattered airplane, but it's also my dream home theatre, mostly due to the animals and 10-minute movie reels.

Oddly enough, the setting reminds me of one horrible day during the summer following high school.

Because of a personnel emergency, my projectionist union sent me to run the far-beyond tacky flicks at the Houston Street Art Cinema in Atlanta. I was recently 18 and scared to death to be downtown in a dive, but I was working my way to college. This place would prove to be more educational than Biology Lab.

The theatre was an old, greasy automobile garage that had been converted into a makeshift auditorium. They specialized in naughty 16mm silent films for gentlemen, cough cough, and their (where applicable) guests, hack hack cough hack shudder.

To placate these discerning audiences, I was instructed to feed an audio cassette of Burt Bacharach's "The Look of Love" album repeatedly through the speaker system, so the overcoat crowd would be dazzled and mood-enhanced by the miracle of sound.

"I can hardly wait to hold you, feel my arms around you, how long I have waited..."

Show business.

Classy.

Thank goodness it wasn't "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head."

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_{With apologies to Mr. Bacharach and, of course, B.J. Thomas.}