I got a story for you. And guess what? I'm not in trouble in this one.
[swoosh] I'm about 11 years old, okay
in the 6th grade this time. And you know how it is when you're a kid.
You got your "A" friends and your "B" friends, right?
There's the kids that you want to hang out with all the time and there's the kids that you
kind of hang out with when the other ones ain't around? So, this is one of the kids
from the "B" list. He lived close to me and stuff and we would hang out
from time to time after school and whatnot. And
we were hanging out there one day and his parents said, "Hey, there's a movie,
The 3 Musketeers, is going to be playing at the Cos Cob Library in
Greenwich. Do you guys want to go? And I guess at the time there was a
"3 Musketeers" movie I think with Paul McCartney or somebody like that was in it
and I was like, "Ooh, that'd be fun. I like The Beatles. This will be great. Yeah, yeah, yeah."
So we get in the car and we go down to the Cos Cob
Library and we sit down. It's not like a movie
theater or anything. We're just sort of watching on folding chairs in this room.
And they start the movie. And the projector sound.
And I'm waiting...
And there's nothing. There's no talking...
just the sound of the projector. There's not even music.
Apparently it was like a "3 Musketeers" movie from
about 1934. And the thing was completely
silent. And I was sitting there going,
"Woah, boy." And I can't even imagine what this
kid's parents must of been --- "Well, jeez, you know, we paid the dollar
to get in or whatever it was, you know,
we understand there's a blind kid with us but what are we going to do? We want to see the movie.
So...
You know, I just sat there and listened to a projector go and it just
took forever. It was just reel after reel
after reel of [projector noise].
That's all it was.
I remember going home after that and waking up the next morning and telling my parents
what I'd been up to the night before. And then it just became
one of those stories the old man, you know, people would be over the house,
the old man, "Hey, tell these people about the movie you saw last weekend.
Come on. It's great. Tell them about the movie." And that became one of those
giant stories that every time company would come around I would
have tell the story of the time I went to see a silent movie.
[laughs] I don't think I even knew that kind
of thing existed... you know, the silent movie.
Because when I would tell the story the next day, the old man's friends would say,
"What about the piano? Wasn't there any nice piano music for you to listen to?"
I said, "No. Just the projector sound."
Maybe that's what pianos used to sound like in those days.
The next weekend they wanted to go to the Museum of Modern Art
in Manhattan and I said, "Nah, I'm not going on that one."
Although, you know what's funny... I used to go on that stuff.
Like in school, you go on field trips and stuff and you go to museums and all this
art galleries and junk like that in school. But I used to go
because being in a room with stuff I can't touch was still better than
being in class. We went on a Circle Line
Ferry one time for a school field trip. And it's all to look at Manhattan
and you travel around the entire island and stuff.
You know, it was nice. It was a nice day in the sunshine. It was better
than school. I went on all those field trips. I went to this
one school just for my sophmore year of high school. I didn't like it very much.
One of the things that we used to do on Wednesdays was go to this
art institute and they'd talk about paintings.
And I remember just sitting on the floor going, "Ah, man,
is this over yet?" Even that was better than class.
We used to have these things called 'film strips' right?
I don't even know what it was but there was a cassette that would play with it
and there's a little 'bong' that told you to advance the thing to the
next picture. I guess they were like slide. But those were okay
because the stories were always sort of decent and I always like to hear the
different noises they used to tell the teacher to advance the film strip for you.
So, those weren't too bad. And the movies that
they'd show in school. You know, they had things like 'You Are There' and all this other kind of
stuff. You know, the other nice thing about that was I could put my head
on the desk because I didn't have to watch the movie. I could just, you know...
catch a couple Z's.
And they ask me questions about the movie and I'm screwed.
They had this other thing when I was in school called the overhead projector.
And it was this transparency paper
and they just put in on some machine and then it would put this image
on a screen, I guess, for the whole class to look at.
That was just another opportunity for me to get a little nap.
It was that and writing
on the board. Those were the two things...
but writing on the board meant the lights were on. When the films and film strips
and the overhead projector --- the lights were all off, so...
I always felt a little better about it, you know. Take a little nap then in the dark.
Come to think of it, though. Those overhead projector things were always silent too.
[laughs] So, here's the thing...
If your kid hangs around with a blind kid, just think a little bit
before you do an activity. Right? "Hey, we've got "The Artist"
on BluRay. Wanna come over?" "Ah, no thanks."
[music plays] This is the Blind Film Critic
and for "3 Musketeers" I'm going to give it zero out of
four eyes open. Next time I'll try a Snickers!