A few nights of every term, Open Gym is set aside in favor of Movie Night. This is one of the only times the Student Store is opened, a version of a concessions stand with handmade cotton candy, fresh popcorn, canned soda, chips and many many kinds of candy. It is a quick, relatively easy money maker, if you are running the Store and have any kind of retail experience.
For those of us helping in other areas, it can be more challenging. All of the proceeds go toward Student Government and the Prom, so only the Secondary teachers work Movie Night. But I had nothing better to do so I wandered over after dinner to lend a hand. The two female teachers were running the concessions stand, the two male teachers were collecting money, though why it took both of them to do this is beyond me. One was much more needed to help me oversee the fifty or so kids from the lower grades and their even younger siblings who were literally running wild in the viewing area in the school's Commons, the main open space that multi-purposes as a breakfast/lunch room, meeting place for the entire community, where we had our potluck last month.
Most of the kids made it to the school on their own (it was still light at 7:30 when they walked the 3 miles from downtown), or were dropped off by parents with a handful of money. The older the child, the more still the child. If one had a phone, there would be a few comrades clustered around, watching a game or YouTube or whatever keeps kids of all cultures busy in the internet these days. This added up to about a dozen students. The rest were, in no particular order, running aimlessly, moving chairs around, sliding on the slick floor in their stockinged feet, jumping off the stage, chasing each other, climbing on anything that looked remotely stable and basically acting like unsupervised kids in a big open space with time to kill.
I, foolishly, thought that once the movie started, things would settle down; kids would watch the movie seated in their chairs or sprawled on the carpeted stage. But nothing changed from the pre-movie activity to the during-the-movie activity. In desperation, I started a game with a group of little kids that revolved around my pretending to be holding a balloon that I would then hand to one of them, he or she would hand it back and I would act as though it weighed fifty pounds or as if it was lifting me off the ground. My tippytoes got a workout last night, as my calves will tell you this morning. One second grader named Nikolas* added to the game by describing the balloons whenever he would "hand" one to me. "This one is Mickey Mouse" or "this one is a rainbow" he would say with a big toothy grin. I pulled out every mime skill I had, and some I never knew I had and clowned for these kids for nearly an hour before someone across the room bumped the projector, shorting out the movie. While Brian the Math teacher got it back running, Donna the Science teacher came out of the store to bellow at the kids to sit down, stop running around, be quiet and watch the movie. They did.
The calm lasted for about three minutes, then all the same kids were back at it. Now, all throughout the evening, and my time as Mandy the Mime, I was also keeping watch on the bathrooms. Through the open doorways, I could see the sink lines in both gender's rooms. I am pretty sure some older girls, high schoolers, were doing something illicit but whenever I wandered in to try to catch them in the act, all I saw was a mighty struggle to insert contact lenses. Is there some kind of new way to get high with contact lens solution? But my time with the little kids was well spent, as they are all little informers at heart and any time they knew someone was up to no good, their first stop was to tell me and accompany me as I went in to check, under the guise of washing my hands.
So, now my time was split between keeping kids from getting hurt and hurting others and hurting the school. The movie chosen for the evening was "Tomorrowland" a movie so long and boring it explained why the audience was so restless. But around 9:30, the dark was pierced by the bright flash of headlights as 4 wheelers and cars came to extract their over-excited, sugared up kids. When the movie finally ended, only ten or so people remained. Cleanup was easy, and home I went but not before learning that nearly 500 bucks came in, and that this was the first time the Secondary team could remember an Elementary teacher coming over to help. The thanks I got was sincere and, while my immediate "Oh hell no" to the invitation to come back next week for "Jurassic World", I know they understood it wasn't because I don't want to help out but that I had earned a pass.
It occurred to me, as I listened to Donna yell at the kids, that the reason these kids don't know how to behave in a movie is that, literally, they have never been in a movie theater. They have never known the anticipation of waiting in the red room with the red curtain, for the curtain to close on the trailers and open again for the Feature Presentation. They've never acted along with the pre-show roller coaster. They have never sat in a fully dark room to watch a movie with a hundred other people. No one has ever shushed them during the climatic scene or felt the twinge of fear that they might get kicked out for singing along with "West Side Story" when it played at the Neptune. They didn't know how to behave at a movie, because they've never been to a movie. This insight really helped me give all those kids a break. But I'm still not volunteering next week.
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