THE HOLLY WOOD THEATRE AS IT STANDS

When I was a kid, the “outside world” was defined by movie houses.  My folks were from places so rural that they didn’t have movies and, of course, there was no television.  We lived at NE 15th in Portland.  Figure ten blocks is about a mile, so this fancy showhouse was a couple of miles away, a little far to walk until one’s teens.  Sandy was a farm delivery road that ran diagonally across the grid system of streets out to the fields along the Columbia River, so Hollywood was an invented community of slightly fancier dwellings and a node of specialty shops, a little sub-town.  When a new show premiered, which was treated like a Broadway opening in Manhattan, a searchlight left over from WWII was set up to put a column of blue light into the sky as a beacon.

Since my paternal grandparents had homesteaded on the prairie, a strategy which developed late to help the railroads, we had a high consciousness that when whites arrived in Portland, “proving up” was how the first owners were established.  NE Portland nearby was just north of “Sullivan’s Gulch” where the freeway was finally situated.  Before the stream was made subterranean, it was undoubtedly a focus of indigenous settlement.  “The Hollywood District was originally part of the Rose City Park subdivision which was platted in 1907. The original Rose City Park subdivision was part of the Donation Land Claim of Joseph Backenstos. The land was later assigned to his widow by President Andrew Johnson in 1866. 1890s-era maps refer to the area as the Crook Tract.”  

At the time homes and shops were built, this was the growing edge of Portland, made possible by bridges across the Willamette.  Nearby Laurelhurst was also meant for fancy homes and since it had been a wealthy farm, it boasted a dug-out farm pond, now populated by waterfowl and thick shrubbery, mostly rhododendron, which made a leafy rendezvous for the fellows of the night.  When I was an animal control officer, my “beat was SE Portland and I was asked to drive through Laurelhurst Park now and then to keep the illicit traffic moving.  The foreman of the park later came out as a gay novelist.

Metropolitan Community Church is at 24th and Broadway.  When a broad swath of Eastside Portland gentrified, many gays claimed these former nodes of commerce alongside the Spanish-speaking entrepreneurs.  The emphasis was on fine food, avant garde art, and the curiously middle-class values of a certain “kind” of man who prefers intimacy with men.  A near-domestic atmosphere had an Edwardian sort of preference for performance (not necessarily hypocritical — just dressing up) and other middle class values like stability, at least for the present.  Housekeeping.

Holiday Park nearby had a sunken horse race track which was later used for performances because after the track was gone, the banks of the subsidence were used for grassy seating.  As a child I saw the opera, “Bridge of the Gods” which is a legend about the forces that created the Columbia Gorge where there was once a stone bridge across the river.  Romeo and Juliet among the Gods and the requisite vengeful father who destroyed the bridge.

A fancy analogy about social forces might compare the story to the hydraulic forces of the stream in Sullivan’s Gulch, but it only fed into the Willamette without a dramatic bridge.  Instead I want to tell about attending the Hollywood Theatre after the cultural revolution had begun in the Seventies.  

I often went to movies and theatre alone.  In fact, for a while I was the theatre critic for a counterculture newspaper.  Television had arrived and movie houses were seriously thinned out.  One of the ways they coped was to split up the big auditoriums into smaller spaces so they could play several movies at once.  In particular, the stage area became a specially cozy space.  In the Hollywood theatre the former wooden floor was filled with squashy old overstuffed sofas and armchairs.  The movies were edgy, sexy, sometimes hard to understand or even follow.

I stepped into the dark that had been a stage.  The movie was on but the image was too dark to see anything — a sinister night alley or something.  A warm hand reached up and took my wrist.  The person had to be sitting on the closest sofa.  The hand tugged me around to sit beside the person and it seemed natural to lean on him a bit.  He knew a lot about film.  There were not many other people so we could talk softly.

When the film came to a bright place — not that bright since this was a moody European film — I saw that this person next to me was a young black man.  I didn’t mind and neither did he.  We were perfectly respectable, just in contact.  At the end of the film, the audience dispersed and so did we.  No exchange of names or phone numbers, just acceptance of a moment of intimacy for what it was.

They teach that a performance is a meeting between the performers and the audience, a mid-air merging of thought and emotion, so we were part of the film.  I don’t remember the name of it.  I reach no conclusion.