I think that everyone has a few dark secrets.  Not meaning, for example, secret suspicious political liasons, or secret ethical failings from the past.  Nothing that dramatic.  Just the little things that you might not really be ashamed of, but things which might take more than fifteen words to explain or justify. 

I am fascinated by the history of American movie theatres, particularly those built at the beginning of the 20 th century.  I mean what is commonly called the movie palace.  You know the type I mean, even if you have never seen one—because they are mostly all gone.  Typically they were built in the 1920s, right at the beginning of movies with sound, and achieved their greatest audience in the forties, during the war, when most major cities were flooded with soldiers, sailors, and airmen looking for cheap entertainment while they waited to go off to war, or while they transferred from one place to another.  They were filled with fancy furniture, sometimes with tables and chairs, even libraries which were occupied by (sometimes sleeping) military men with no place to go. 

Appropriately enough, most of the time, you see these movie theatres, actually, in the movies.  A film set in the 20s might show a couple leaving a movie palace after their first date, or an evil character might pursue an innocent person off the street into a lavish lobby, and there you are, in the middle of a movie palace. 

Most of them are gone, victims of economy and business cycles, victims of television and the computer, victims of compact discs and downtown urban crime.  There used to be one right next to the church, on Seventh Avenue, across from St. Vincent 's Hospital, which is, itself now quite gone.  It was called the Loews Sheridan Theatre, and it was located in a little triangle of land which was bought by the hospital and used for hospital maintenance and engineering, I think. 

Many of these old theatres had these huge pipe organs.  The organs were put in to accompany silent pictures.  In some of the very early days of film, the movies were accompanied by little orchestras or quartets.  Pretty soon, a guy named Rudolph Hope Jones came up with the idea of using organs, because they make many different sounds, which were adaptable to different films.  So, they did.  Soon there appeared horns and sirens on the organs, sometimes telephone bells, maybe even breaking glass—all to be used in coordination with the themes of the movies.  The organs got bigger and more flamboyant and pretty soon they were put on elevators and lifted into the theatre as a stirring fanfare was played by the experienced organist.  They were great. 

But by the time of my misspent youth, most of them were gone.  Many were replaced with large air-conditioning units, others were sold to help the theatre pay for all those empty, unused seats, some were simple pounded into pieces when the theatres were torn down for the latest downtown parking lot. 

But there were a few remaining ones, and one my favorites was in the Fox Theatre in San Francisco .  I began going there when I was in high school and could drive myself, because my parents were not going to fool around doing something as silly as listening to some old pipe organ.  The concerts were held in the middle of the night after the sixteen people who had come to see the latest version of the Bible in Cinemascope had staggered out into Market Street at the end of the last show.  

The concert began with the lowering of all the house lights, until all you could see were about thirty Exit signs.  Then a baby spotlight picked out a spot in the center of the orchestra pit.  A soft echo of post horn or diapason began gently to be heard.  Then, there was an easy swell of the pipes and the spotlight picked out the top of the gold, red, and ivory white console of the organ as it heaved into view and came up about fifteen feet on its own elevator.  And as it rose, the organist added more stops until the instrument was rattling the rafters, if the Fox had had any rafters. 

Wow it was something!  You would not believe it.  Horns and drums, the soft sounds of violins and cello, and the whole orchestra rose into the theatre in a great crescendo, building to a breathtaking climax.  The organist was usually dressed in tuxedo, and if it were a woman, she was in an evening gown.  One of the most famous organists had all her dresses designed with the main decoration on the back—because that was the part of her most consistently visible to the audience.  Sometimes the organ would rotate 180 degrees, sometimes the  organist would spin around on a specially designed seat and face the audience to talk to them.  The organists all seemed to be very handsome young men with curly  dark hair, pale skin and either deep brown or bright blue eyes.  Sometimes I wondered if they were chosen for their potential appeal to the young ladies in the audience—or, after all this was San Francisco —the young men.  All that crescendo, all that gold leaf, all that schmaltzy registration—it was beyond belief. 

It was better than sex.  (As I later found out.)

Well, I learned as the years went by, to be a bit diffident about disclosing my passion for the movie palace and its great golden Wurlitzer console organ.  Usually, I did not let people know.  It is bad enough that you spent your youth memorizing the names of the First Ladies of the Unites States without giving people more reason to suspect your inner motives and interests.

By the time I moved to New York , I had begun to be more sanguine about letting people know about my dirty little gold-leafed secret.  And after I had been here about a year, I read in a book about the history of old theatres, that there was one of them which was still accessible.  It was the Loews 175 th Street theatre up in Harlem .  The article showed a picture of the organ. 

And this building was now a Church.  And they had services on Sunday afternoon.  I could go.  And so, I did. 

The Church experience is the subject of a whole other essay, but the theatre experience was great.  They had a very capable man playing the organ – whom I later came to know as James Leaffe, a Seneca Indian who was from around the Buffalo area.  And he was teriffic.  He knew how to get all the best sounds out of the instrument.  The Loews Co. had taken pretty good care of the organ and the building, so there was some good stuff to work with.  He and I later became friends, but that first day, all I did was to slink up beside the organ console as he was playing the people out of the theatre and say hello before he put the beast back in its cage. 

It was fun to get to know Jim and to hear him play the organ.  Once he even volunteered to play the organ for me and for my friend David from San Francisco , another organ enthusiast.  We had a concert for two.

One time, I met him in the backstage area of the theatre and we walked out into the orchestra pit together.  We talked about the house, its design and structure.  And then it was time to hear some music. 

Jim went over to the great golden console and pulled the canvas dust cover off the behemoth.  Sitting down at the console he checked a few things for tuning and set some registrations.  Then, he turned to me, patted the bench on which he was sitting.  And smiled.  And he said the words which were a key to unlock one of my secret fantasies. 

“Say, Lloyd, why don't you sit on the console with me and we will ride up together” 

And we did.  I think I cried, it was such a majestic experience, rising on that great golden Robert Morton console, the swell pedals opening more and more of the 30 ranks to expression, and filling progressively more and more of the great gilded hall with thundering overture. 

My very own chance to ride the great golden console up into the glory of a world long gone, but a world still accessible through something which was more than memory, it was a real invitation. 

You know how things are sometimes.  New demands change available time, business of all sorts squeezes even the magic things out of your schedule.  And I had a feeling that Jim was not particularly healthy.  Eventually, we fell out of touch. 

I saw an item in a theatre journal the other day, indicating that he had died.  He was, I guess, a long term survivor of AIDS, but it still got him.  Bless you, James, you and your father and grandfathers in the longhouses of the Seneca upstate.  Bless you, James, who quite literally made a dream come true, turned fantasy into experience, and damned near caused me to have a coronary on 175th Street in a gilded plaster palace of illusion and artistic overstatement.  Bless you for making a dream come true. 

The Rev’d Lloyd Prator, Rector
Saint John’s in the Village Episcopal Church

New York City