Sharing Memories: Movie Time!

Sharing Memories is a series of weekly prompts to help all genealogists (including me!) with writing up memories of our ancestors and our childhood. 

We all love to find a diary or letters written by great grandma or grandpa where they talk about their lives and share their memories. Think how excited one of your descendants will be to read about your memories and your stories! These stories will be lost after a few generations unless we preserve them. And what better way than in a weekly themed post. 

At the end of the year you will have 52 stories written about your childhood, your parents, grandparents and who knows what else.

If you write your own blog please use the hashtag #52SharingMemories if you are posting on Twitter or Google+  You can also  post your stories as comments on this blog post or in a private journal. It's your choice! The important thing is to write those memories down now! 

Today's topic or prompt is Movie Time! Did you go to the matinees every Saturday? Maybe your town or village didn't have a movie theater - mine didn't.  Maybe you remember your very first movie. What did you see? How old were you? Tell us about the experience - the sights, the sounds, the smells of food in the lobby. 

The village where I grew up did not have a local theater and the closest was in Oshawa which was about 16 km (10 miles) away. I don't recall my parents ever going to  what we called "the show" so of course we kids never got to go either. I was quite young when my sister-in-law took me to see Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Yep. My mother had forbidden her to take me but she did it anyway! 

And my mother was right. I had nightmares for months. But I loved the adventure and the excitement of being with my sister-in-law who I adored. I'd never had popcorn before and Jeanette bought me popcorn and a coke. For a shy quiet kid from the wrong side of the tracks who rarely had a treat of any kind, it was a heavenly day for me.

The next movie I saw was Walt Disney's "The Parent Trap".  I loved it! But I don't remember who I went with and I was too young to go on my own. 

Then came the big excitement of going all the way to the big city of Toronto with my first boyfriend to see "Ben Hur". The only other times I'd ever been to the city was for the yearly Santa Claus Parade (but I always got terribly car sick and threw up for the entire 40 minute drive each way) and for my eye appointments at Sick Children's Hospital (ditto re the throwing up!) 

By the time I was 16 years old I had probably seen 4 movies.  To this day I'm not really a movie fan.

Credits: "Vintage Film Reel" by ponsulak at freedigitalphotos.net