In Theda Bara's Tent (as Reviewed by Publisher's Weekly)

CHAPTER THREE

He let me examine the birds, heard my admiring sighs as I noticed how he had painted tiny individual feathers on the canary and vicious talons on the eagle. At last, I came to the point. “Ive come for a job,” I said. “Im good at sweeping.

But I already have a youngster who sweeps,” he said. “I cant let two in free.” He saw how disappointed I was. “Heres what Ill do, since youre a fellow art lover. You can see the show this afternoon. Just this one time. Our secret.

When I returned later that afternoon, the place was jammed with women, babies, schoolchildren and men. Everyone spoke a different language: Italian, Armenian, Polish or Russian. Children shouted in English to friends, then switched languages to speak to their mothers. Loud ventilating fans blew odors from food baskets—sausage, garlic, cheese. The Bijou Theater had once been a store, and some of the display shelves were still on the walls. About three hundred folding chairs were set up in rows facing a white canvas screen suspended from the ceiling by heavy ropes. Next to the screen was an upright piano with some keys missing. Mr. Owen was inside a metal booth threading the projector.

The piano player, a thin man in a striped shirt, sat at the piano and played the most beautiful music I had ever heard. He told me later it was Chopin. The first reel was a travelogue, Coney Island at Night—the roller coaster lit up like a birthday cake, a glittering world that stayed on the screen for three minutes. Mr. Owen projected a slide: You Wouldnt Spit on the Floor at Home, So Please Dont Do It Here. Children all over the house translated the English words for their parents. Next slide: Just a Moment, Please, While the Operator Changes Reels. We saw the Yale football team at practice, a steam shovel digging the New York subway, a locomotive being stoked with coal and a circus elephant being electrocuted because it had killed two men.

I had never seen actualities before. At Mr. Goldfarb’s store I’d seen only trick pictures and made-up stories about bandits and train robberies. Mr. Owen was showing us real events stripped of smells and sounds. I noticed how detached I felt when the elephants bulk collapsed. If I had been there, would I have been moved to tears, smelling it and hearing its beastly moan? As for the digging of the subway, I had seen that myself when I lived in New York. How different it was on the screen—no dust in your eyes, no men shouting to each other, no lift of the stomach at the thought of falling in, no deafening machinery. The event had been sanitized by making a movie of it.        

Something else was going on, too, that was the reverse of everyday life. The death of an elephant was trivialized, and college boys playing football were made to seem important. I found this confusing and exhilarating. As I was struggling to understand why this was exciting, the screen lit up with Hunting Big Game in Africa. The film starred our former president Teddy Roosevelt who went to the Belgian Congo to collect specimens for the Smithsonian Institution. Onscreen were scenes of dense jungle and several Negro gun bearers. Teddy, in his customary safari outfit, led everyone through thick underbrush, then—oh, my god! A lion! Teddy aimed, fired, and the lion dropped. The boys in the audience jumped up cheering; the girls moaned in pity for the beast. Spellbound, we saw Teddy walk among other beasts—some of them still alive. The last title card was “The most noteworthy collection of big animals that has ever come out of Africa.”

As luck would have it, the boy who swept the peanut shells off the floor of the Bijou moved away, and I got the job. Lady Mother reminded me that she did not approve of motion pictures, but she did not stop me. She had a relaxed attitude toward me because I didn’t really count. All the other children at the home had a history in Haverhill. Freckles, for instance, was the child of a prostitute who worked on Essex Street. Another child was the daughter of the town drunk. The parents of the twins were killed in a train wreck that everyone still remembered. No one was looking over Lady Mother’s shoulder about me. It was as if I had been dropped from the moon.