Posted by:
donbagley
(
)
Date: September 24, 2015 04:11PM
In the spring of 1968, when I was ten, my father said the guys at Columbia University told him he should see a movie that had just come out. It was called 2001, and it was about the future. That was all I knew when he took me with him to the Saturday matinee. It was just him and me. I don’t know if no one else in the family was interested, or if Dad was just trying to save money, because we were living on government grants and the income from his part time job at the university. He and I rode the bus down Broadway to the theater.
We took our seats in the crowded cinema and waited for the curtains to roll back. The movie opened with a scene of eclipsing planets and a short piece of dramatic classical music that soared brilliantly. Then there was a beautiful desert scene and the subtitle said it was the dawn of man. The movie segued into the starkness of space with the most realistic spaceships I’d ever seen. There was a docking sequence with a magnificent soundtrack that I later found on one of my mother’s LP records. The music was the Blue Danube waltz by Johann Strauss II, and it became my favorite along with the Beatles songs I heard on radios.
I had to squint as we emerged from the dark theater to the sunlit corridor of Broadway. A plane flew across the sky, and I thought it could be a spaceship if it didn’t have wings. There wasn’t much dialog in the movie, said Dad. We walked to the bus stop and I tried to take slow, measured steps like I was walking on the moon. Dad wondered if the charcoal monoliths in the movie were supposed to be God or some kinds of gods. You never knew with those jokers in the film industry. A bus pulled up, and its brakes hissed at him while the door opened like an airlock. Man wasn’t meant to go to the moon. And there’d never be a twenty-first century anyway, because the Lord would’ve come by then. My father chuckled at the movie’s myriad flaws. Good thing he’d only been nicked for two tickets.