tablecloth bonanza
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.
At the video store, Brown had had a slow night, sat through most of a Godfather without the door’s annoying little bell alerting him not to slouch. There were the usual customers. The lady who came in early once a month, still wearing her drone outfit, always rented Schindler’s list, and returned it puffy-eyed just before he closed up shop. The myopic stunted kid, who took ages sneaking peeks at the store’s more risqué content. The optimistic Midwestern guy who was working his way through the foreign section, film by film, now at G, for Ginger E Fred, reminded him of himself when he visited his first video store in Oregon, pacing starry-eyed and dithering before the wall of same-size boxes plastered with frozen faces. He found a box that seemed unthreatening, a love story he thought, in timid black and white, the title incomprehensible but somehow familiar. Seated in the rental’s sunken rec room, right on the soft receptive fur, he did not understand a word the unseen nervous man was saying. Mesmerized by the wide scenes on the television’s bulging screen, he never saw the rest of the film, rewinding again to that first part. The bridge, the park, the snow, the music, this city, this was cinema, this was America; not the yellowish earth of Oregon, nor his mother’s morning porridge or the singing wires above their square home in the woods.
Posts
