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Wednesday, August 3, 2005

Cinema in Loring

It was as if you invited a handful of people over for a movie and 1,000 showed up. But you didn’t care because they weren’t strangers, they were your friends, and so you simply compromised by moving the crowd to Loring Park, unfurling your blankets, removing your shoes to cool your hot toes, spreading out your crackers and drinks and dogs and gurgling babies, and settling in for a good James Dean flick.

That’s how Monday was. The air cooled, humidity lifted and then fell again, dusk descended and Rebel Without a Cause was projected on a screen in front of hundreds of lounging, sweating people, young, old and in between.

It was communal. Like dinner with a big Italian family. Blankets overlapped blankets of strangers as people searched for space and no one cared. The little black pug dog belonging to the people in front of me sniffed my toes and then began licking them.

“Norton!” his owner said and pulled the snorting pug away.

“I probably needed the cleaning,” I replied. After the owner turned back to watching James Dean, Norton went back to examining my toes.

Friends surrounded me on the blanket and in the crowd. Josh and Josh walked by and I grabbed them for a quick chat and hugs. Aaron T. walked by and I grabbed him for a quick chat and hugs. Jim walked by searching for seats so I grabbed him and his boyfriend and offered up a corner of our blanket, which they gladly accepted.

We all laughed together at the absurdity of the 1950s. (“He called me a… a… a DIRTY TRAMP!” Natalie Wood said, horrifed.) We cheered when Sal Mineo put the moves on James Dean. (But really, did he have to have a strange father complex? Couldn’t he have just been gay? Not in the 1950s, I guess.)

For a couple of hours we forgot about the boundaries of Minnesota Nice and enjoyed an early August evening together, blissfully free from mosquitoes and with a beautiful sky overhead. An hour and a half into the movie, I laid my head down onto the blanket and looked up into that sky until my eyes closed and the voices from the screen and the laughter from the crowd lulled me to contented sleep.

Posted by Aaron on August 3, 2005 10:20 PM