This Amsterdam cinema from the past turns out to be … still a cinema.
Amsterdam has done very well weather-wise for one whole day.
But when it begins to rain, I know there’s no bucking a weather system. I decide to go and see a movie in the theatre where I used to work as a commissionaire more than thirty years ago. It’s on the Leidseplein. Outwardly it hasn’t changed, but once inside, only the contours of thirty years ago are there.
There’s no commissionaire anymore. The elderly, chain smoking ladies who used to sit in the glassed-in box office – one with a boil the size of a swollen golf ball on the top of her head, the other periodically emerging in a stooped manner from the box office to review the behaviour of obnoxious moviegoers with me – have also gone and so has the glassed-in box office.
It may have achieved a new lease of life as a smokers’ asylum at an airport in the Far East.
The elderly ladies have probably died. Anyway, dead or somehow still alive, they have been replaced with a series of ticket dispensing consoles. I insert my VISA card but get a bad read. Not just once, but twice and would have a third time but for the intervention of an attractive, young woman.
Dripping with social skills, she addresses me, explaining in soothing tones that a “special” card is needed. “Why don’t I issue you with a ticket right here at my desk”, and she ushers me to the place where exceptions are dealt with.
I remember discussing the prospects of this movie theatre on a similar day at a similar time some thirty years ago with the back-from-retirement part-time manager-on-duty, not to be confused with The Manager, Mr Kokmeyer, a man so thin, so pale, so red-eyed and so stressed, I once saw him lighting a Peter Stuyvesant while an earlier, burning Peter Stuyvesant was still wedged between his lips.
Mr Kokmeyer had bravely gone beyond lighting one cigarette with another.
Discussing anything with Mr Kokmeyer was not done. It would, everyone felt, give him a heart attack, in itself a desirable outcome even for Mr Kokmeyer himself, but no one wanted it on their conscience.
Anyway, the back-from-retirement part-time manager-on-duty and I lamented the advent of VHS-tapes and video shops and the certain death these spelt for cinemas. What, we mused, smoking our Marlboro’s, would the theatre end up as. The Duty Manager thought it would end up as some sort of dance hall.
“People”, he opined, “will always want to dance, although it beats me why.”
I thought the theatre would end up as a discount persian carpet shop, something the manager-on-duty thought was so funny he laughed and laughed and laughed until his emphysema caught up with him, which didn’t take all that long, certainly not three ‘laughed’-s. Maybe part of one.
But the movie theatre had simply remained a movie theatre. Smokefree. Something neither of us foresaw.
When the movie finishes, and I exit the theatre, it is still raining.
