|
Owl Show
by Ed Mauget
At the time I was able to read well enough to scan the movie page
in the Chronicle, I remember periodically seeing a small ad saying
"Owl Show Tonight." The blurb had a line-art drawing of an
owl. I asked my mom what it meant. I don't remember the answer, but
do remember sensing bad vibes. Thus I thought maybe an Owl Show was
fun, since my mom seemed to be against anything that was fun.
By the time I was at Rogers, I knew that an Owl Show was a triple
feature of B-films shown starting at midnight on a Friday. It came
to pass that Bob Parry had a driver's license and the use of the
aging secondary family car, a 1947 fast back Pontiac. Bob's mother,
Mary, called this "the good car."
Bob and I decided to go to the Owl Show one summer, probably just
before our senior year. I cannot say which theater hosted this
montage of B-film schlock, except that I can say what theaters could
not have hosted it. It was downtown, but not a skid row. Thus is was
not the Rialto, Garland, or the El Rey. It did not ordinarily show
adult-only films, so was not the Bandbox. It was a medium-sized,
ordinary venue. It was too big to be a Fox and too small to be a
Granada. It was not overly elegant like an Orpheum. The Orpheum was
razed about then anyway. The theater was too elegant to be a Rexx. I
think it was either the Liberty or the State or the Post.
So one summer midnight, Bob and I found ourselves sitting on the
aisle, about halfway back, in the Liberty Theater or the State
Theater or the Post Theater. Midnight! It was only a couple of years
earlier that I'd first experienced a date-change at midnight. My,
weren't we growing up! The crowd was a tad rowdy. The audience age
range was probably 18-25. There were guys crawling across the aisle,
playing hide-and-seek or playing tricks on one-another. I was a bit
apprehensive, but nobody bothered us.
They rolled three films. Each was a forgettable B-grade film. Thus
it is surprising that I never quite forgot the essence of two of the
movies.
Bob and I (and Mary), were heavily into science fiction, no matter
how campy or stupid. One of the films had Robbie the Robot, later
seen in Lost in Space. You know, the robot with a fishbowl head with
protruding revolving antennae, and retractable arms. This is the
robot that would thrash his arms and would say, "Danger Will
Robinson! Storm approaching!" I don't remember the plot of this
film, except that I loved it, and it was in color.
The next film has a kind of horror flick in black-and-white. It had
the tired old theme of some slob staying overnight in a spooky
English manor house where things don't seem quite right. Each night
he heard a slush, slush sound go past his door. He could not check
it out because, of course, his door was locked-from-the-outside each
night. In the morning a servant would unlock the door. The guest
would observe wet spots on the floor but nobody answered his
questions.
Eventually he learned the secret. The baron of the house, for some
reason, had been turned mostly into a frog. A man-sized frog, he
was. He crawled, but didn't hop. The servants escorted him out to a
pond at night and returned him to his quarters before dawn. Slush,
slush, slop, slop - the sound of the frog-of-the-house being led to
and from his pond. I do not remember the reason or the resolution of
this issue. I cannot say why the guest was there, except that the
frog had requested his presence. I did actually enjoy this movie.
The third movie must have been truly forgettable because I truly
forgot it. By the time it was over the audience was quite subdued. I
remind the reader that the audience was composed of young people who
did not like to sleep at night, but who were at the peak of their
sleeping ability once the sun rose. This audience resembled vampires
in this respect.
Bob and I wandered outside to a glorious dawn. It was a wondrous new
experience to see the sun set and then rise again without an
intervening sleep period. I felt awfully grown up. A few years later
it wasn't so glorious when I would periodically get caught in a
customer emergency at IBM and work through a couple of sun-cycles.
-Ed Mauget |
