Potential Stumbling Blocks

It's a little like a rainy day at camp.

You sit in an auditorium in a folding chair listening to the whirring of a projector and get lost in a black and white world.

Or maybe that was just the camp I got sent to.

James River Film Society began their "Films for Lunch" series today and I was right there, just like I have been for the past three or four years.

Even when I worked at (shudder) the RTD, I'd take my lunch hour at the library during November for the sake of seeing a vintage film.

This years' theme is "Great Adaptations of the Silver Screen" and today's film was 1942's "The Magnificent Ambersons," adapted from the Booth Tarkington novel.

Sure, sure, Orson Welles' story of the decline of a wealthy and prominent family touched on the rise of the automobile culture and the beginnings of suburban sprawl, but how about the look at a time long gone?

Cotillions, serenades, balls, all day open houses. A girl refusing to see a guy because of a "drinking incident" where he broke his bass fiddle.

A sleigh ride in the afternoon that he bullies her into doing with him because men could boss girls around knowing that they would eventually acquiesce.

And a time when after a conversation saying goodbye to the love of her life as blithely as she could manage, the girl walks into a drug store and asks for a few drops of aromatic spirits and promptly faints before the druggist can give it to her.

The way I see it, it was both easier and harder to be female back then.

Says the person who's been finding it excruciatingly difficult here lately. Thanks, guys.