Until I was twelve and was allowed to go with friends, I thought everybody went to the movies like my parents, walking in whenever they arrived, seeing whatever happened to be playing from half way through or from near the end or beginning, then staying until somebody said, “Here’s where we came in.”
I didn’t mind. We went to the movies every Friday night except when my father worked three-to-eleven, going to see whatever was showing in Factoryville. We didn’t get a newspaper. We just drove into town and picked one or the other of the two theaters. “Ok,” my mother would say. “Look up the street and tell us what’s at the Penn.”
Even at fourteen, I still loved that moment as our Chevy crossed the intersection. Most nights, I could shout out the title at the Penn before my father could read the marquee at the Factory two blocks farther down Industry Avenue. Horror gangster films were what I watched with my friends, but my parents chose costume dramas, musicals, or comedies.
Or a Bible epic, because, for sure, if Jesus was in a movie, my father picked that one. The Robe. And the sequel, Demetrius and the Gladiators, even though it was second-hand Jesus, since he’d already been crucified in The Robe.
My sister Linda and I knew the stories. No matter what miracles he performed, Jesus was always going to ride the donkey into Jerusalem and get hung on the cross. “It’s no different than Shakespeare,” my mother would say. “You know what happens to Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar and all the rest.”
That was exactly the problem. It was just like Shakespeare, and I wasn’t looking forward to Hamlet and Macbeth. I wanted stories where the characters had a million little problems instead of one enormous one. Like I did. The way I felt like I was walking in a cloud of gnats. I had to keep fanning the air around my face or I’d be swallowing them or squeezing them out of my tear-filled eyes.
To tell the truth, Jesus was never exactly in those movies, because he was only shown from the back–long flowing hair, a white robe, a set of hands meant to display his twenty-four/seven holiness by being folded in prayer or lying gently on top of someone’s head, especially a child’s or a sick person’s. And he always had a beautiful, soft, warm voice speaking the King James or Revised Standard English of the Bible.
We were supposed to know Jesus was the son of God from the awestruck look on the faces of disciples and crowds of people in robes. When he reached the important part of what he was saying, he became outstretched hands and an uplifted back of the head, intoning advice in his perfectly pitched voice because showing the face of Christ on screen was taboo.
But during that year I was in ninth grade, we saw King of Kings, arriving during the Beatitudes, and suddenly, before we’d even settled in, there was Jesus looking right at us. He had blue eyes and was pretty-boy handsome.
“That was worse than nudity,” my father said in the car five minutes after Jesus, facing us, started preaching “the Blesseds” for the second time.
“When did we ever see that?” I said, but my father didn’t answer.
“I don’t think your father wants to talk about it,” my mother said, and he didn’t, at least not until Sunday when he stopped at a newsstand after church, something that surprised me because we kept the Sabbath holy by never doing anything, not even buying a paper, since that required someone else’s work.
“It’s not enough they made that fellow Jesus,” my father said. “He acted like some ordinary Joe. Nobody would believe that a Jesus who walked and talked like that had anything to do with God.” He came back with the Sunday edition of the Pittsburgh Press.
Half way through lunch he opened the newspaper to the entertainment section and started to read. “The movies always play in Pittsburgh before they play in Factoryville,” he said. “I’ll know what’s coming next time.”
He opened the paper wide, covering his face. “We have to be careful now,” he said. “There’s no telling what’s next.” All we could see of him were his hands.
