TwisterUprocker wrote:
The first time you went to the movie theater alone.
For me it was Infinity War
The first one I explicitly remember was
The Godfather a few weeks after high school graduation.
It was what happened after that brings it to mind.
I went to the movie in a nearby town in which people from my town aren't always welcome. After the movie, I was driving down Main Street and someone yelled at me from along the train tracks, "If you're from (my town), come over here."
My immediate thoughts were, "I made it all the way through high school without getting the crap beat out of me here and now it's going to happen. I might as well get it over with."
So I pulled over. Immediately, one guy got in front of the car, one behind, one on the right door, and three on the left.
The conversation went something like this:
Ringleader: You're from (my town)?
Me: Yep.
Ringleader: Are you a Jesus Freak?
Me: Nope.
Ringleader: That's good because if you were, we were going to beat you up.
For the younger crowd, this was several months after the movie,
Jesus Christ, Superstar came out. After seeing the movie, lots of people started doing things like preaching on street corners and were called "Jesus Freaks". A guy I knew in high school from my town had been going to that town and preaching on the street corners. We drove very similar cars and so they thought I was him.
After that, we had a fairly nice and routine conversation. The guys from the front, back, and right side of my car came over and we talked for a while.
It turned out that one of them had kinfolk who had lived in a dugout for decades and were among my nearest neighbors. I also knew his sister, but he didn't hold that against me.
They were serious about beating me up, too. That was the mindset of high school kids and younger adults in that town back then. Nearly exactly two years later I was standing in almost the exact same place talking to someone else from there. He had graduated from high school a year earlier. About half an hour after I left, the sheriff's department swooped in and arrested him for chasing a guy out of town, beating the crap out of him, and burning his pickup to the ground.
The odd thing was that he was barely out of jail after spending 11 months of the previous 12 months in jail for stealing coats, goats, or cokes (I never did catch which).
He's still around. I see him on occasion when I'm in that town.
Anyway, to the best of my knowledge, the first time I ever went to a movie by myself was to see
The Godfather.