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Old Movies: Sundays,
Cottonport, Avoyelles Parish
by James Bolner, Sr. I remember those old movies-- Especially Sunday afternoon
easterns
in the real theater in Cottonport, Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. The theater still smelled of gunpowder from the westering of Saturday
night:
Hopalong Cassidy had raced in the moonlight to do abiding justice; the Cisco Kid and Pancho had saved all of us from blackhatted mustachos. Lash Larue had whipped his way out of an ambush. And there was dust from the continueds. The continueds had been
classic:
white men in khaki with black pistols driving a woodgrain stationwagon through improbable trails in Rhodesia-- all to save a white virgin. I remember Anne Miller's silk stockings: The camera edged unhelpfully to
show me what I wanted to see.
I remember Donald O'Connor, slick and ineffective, but there, dancing, moving
against
what I knew to be a simple screen. Bing Crosby, colored to seem good. Gene Kelly, whose feet I always doubted. I remember them all: Tab Hunter, his chest muscles heaving against Natalie Wood's
firm breasts.
I wallowed in the rich luxury of the Amazon. I especially remember the falling feeling that the show would be bad,
that
the borrowed thirty-five cents would be wasted. © James Bolner, Sr., Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1994 |
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