Red Dawn and Crew

I remember when they opened up the then "new" movie theater in the city where I grew up. Originally our city had held the record for the first drive-in movie in the country, so when Sumner Redstone of Viacom fame decided to redevelop and build up his then Showcase Cinema business his first of many mega-plex movie theaters was in our little beach front city. I think I was eleven years old when they (National Amusements) opened that theater. We snuck into see "The World According to Garp," with Robin Williams which you had to do a lot back then, because there wasn't a PG-13 rating yet, and none of us were 13 in the first place. Usually this was done by getting someone's parent to buy the tickets for you, or standing outside the theater to ask some other left over 70's freedom loving person to buy them for us, but we always got to see every movie we wanted to one way or another.

Later that week we got to see "Tron," which I think was sold out, or I got voted out by my pals, I don't remember exactly. I'm amazed to think now that it was now over 25 years ago that we began spending so much time at that movie theater, where we would soon see others like the one I caught most of just today, "Red Dawn," the great eighties movies that highlights so well the reality of the Cold War my friends and I were brought up in. That film with the young Charlie Sheen, Patrick Swayze, and a host of other actors that would later make up crews for movies like,

"The Outsiders, and Dirty Dancing," really captured the essence of the cold war fear scenarios that weaved their way into our young psyches. I think myself and all my buddies hoped for and wanted the day when we might see Russian Troops parachuting in front of our school. We were ready. This movie made us believe, and showed us how. But by the time it came out in August of 1984 we were now 13 years old, not eleven like when the theater opened and we weren't in the fifth grade anymore like we were when they probably began writing that movie, but I can assure you when school opened that September, I wasn't the only kid looking out the east windows of the Paul Revere School onto the baseball field, hoping.