SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES

In the late 1950’s when the world was young and so was I, my greatest treat was my Saturday night visit to the local cinema.
As I, and my two cousins were too young to go on our own, the job of babysitter was usually foisted upon my Great Grandmother. Sometimes we would spend Saturday evening at home in front of the small black and white TV watching the hockey game, while my Great Grandmother would knit wool socks, sweaters and three-piece suits, if someone let her. She could never grasp the intricacies of the game, and why the grown men on the screen were always mad at each other, and fist fighting.  Another perplexing aspect of the hockey game was why they would, as she put it, “try to knock that little black button into that house”.

 My Mother and Aunts would plan a girls’ night out, and for the next three hours we boys would be free to watch tawdry “B” movies and break up fights started by my Great Grandmother with other paying customers that had the audacity to actually wish to listen to the dialogue on the screen.  The fact that the old lady did not know how to speak English, after having lived in Canada for over a half a century, and, therefore could not follow the plot on the screen, didn’t seem to rule her out as our chaperone.  My Great Grandmother was five feet tall, and five feet wide, and her one and only English phrase was “You Shaddupp”.   I don’t know that she ever really knew what it meant, but one of her sons had taught it to her, and she used it every chance she got.  The phrase didn’t even have to be in context to the conversation.  I would ask “Grandma, would you like me to make you a cup of tea?”  She would nod her head in the affirmative, and yell out “you shaddupp”.

Then as now, bringing your own food into the movie theatre was not allowed.  This was yet another one of those rules that didn’t seem to apply to her.  A speech by the Theatre Manager on bringing in deep-fried ethnic food, laced with garlic which could be smelt all the way back to the old country, was routinely given at the ticket window.  This would illicit nods of agreement from the old lady who would then close the ten minute lecture with the obligatory shaking of her fist and a booming ‘You Shaddupp”.

While other kids would get to consume traditional treats such as pop corn, cold drinks, chocolate bars and licorice, I and my cousins would spend the next three hours sitting in the dark and eating things usually found on the menu of back street bistros in Istanbul. My particular favorite was lumps of goat cheese swimming in salt water brine, which I was told was good for me, if I could manage to keep it down for more than five minutes. There was also a deep-fried onions in a butter that could double as a poultice if you were unfortunate enough to fall out of the balcony and break a bone.  Hospitals, I learned at an early age were only for ‘sick people”.  Next came dates threaded onto a string in a large circle with a picture of men riding camels and wearing turbans on the label.  These, I was told, were also good for me, and, if I ate enough of them they would open up my bowels which to my young mind was not advantageous if you wanted to remain in your seat and follow the plot on the screen. If these dishes didn’t satiate your appetite there was always the cold broiled barley in a metal pot.  This was a versatile dish that could also be sprinkled on the bodies of recently-departed souls to ensure instant entrance into heaven.  I seem to remember our priest objecting to this practice at my cousin’s funeral on the grounds that the ritual was not found anywhere in the bible.  He fell into line right after getting the “you shaddupp” speech and the threat of the dreaded bear hug which was my Great Grandmother’s favourite wrestling move.  I once saw her place a six-foot-tall truck driver, who was foolish enough not to pay his bill for coffee in my Great Grandfather’s restaurant, in traction with that bear hug.  The bad news is the man was not allowed into the restaurant again, but the good news was he didn’t have to visit the chiropractor for the next two years.

Dessert was always saved for last where we were allowed to eat our fill from a large brown paper shopping bag of walnuts.  My Great Grandmother never owned a nut cracker, at least I never saw her with one.  She probably thought it was an unnecessary extravagance.  While Homo Sapiens have opposable thumbs, differentiating us from lower forms of life, my Great Grandmother also had opposable molars (all two of them).

She had this uncanny knack of waiting until the exact moment in the on-screen dialogue, when the detective would announce “and the killer is’ when she would place one of these wooden golf balls (walnuts) in her mouth and a loud cracking sound would reverberate around the theater.  Picture a family of beavers gnawing down a tree to build a dam and you get the idea.  For some strange reason the refined popcorn eating crowd would become annoyed at this assault to their ear drums, and, on numerous occasions a lady sitting a row ahead of us would climb over the seat and the Projectionists would have to stop the picture until the women could be separated by ushers wielding flashlights.

My Great Grandmother would usually say something in her own language about corn being used to feed cattle, and end the debate with her standard “you shaddup’.