I suppose you could almost say we fell in love over movies. During the thirty-six years of my now-defunct first marriage, I had pined for a movie companion, for someone to share my fascination with the screen. My former husband, a gifted musician, cared more for audio than video, unless it was a sporting event. Late summer, fall, and winter weekends meant the TV was on full football blast for hours at a time, and by dark, I often yearned simply for quiet. But even during those years, my favorite evenings were those when we brought supper into the living room and watched a video I had rented, as carefully chosen as the shows my parents had picked out, but with different criteria: no British dialogue (he could not follow it); no subtle psychological drama (he could lose patience); no Woody Allen (he wouldn’t get the humor); and nothing with a bad score (he would criticize the music so loudly I could not hear the dialogue). Occasionally we would talk a little afterward about the movie we had seen. Once in the early years of our marriage, he had presented me with a hand-written “gift certificate” good for five movies — he knew how much I loved them. But finally at the theater, the soundtrack struck his perfect hearing as too loud, too quiet, or garbled; a wad of gum attached itself to his shoe; or the picture waffled in and out of focus. At times it seemed he spent more time in the lobby complaining than he did watching the movie. And he was never the sort of person with whom I could exchange a glance during a particularly charged scene. He was never a hand-holder. Love scenes usually left him scornful.

… I had pined for a movie companion, for someone
to share my fascination
with the screen.

During my junior high school years, when my girl friend Sandy Davison, her boyfriend, his buddy, and I would be dropped off at a movie by Sandy’s mother, we sat four in a row while Sandy and her boyfriend made out. I gradually became aware of the male wrist on the arm rest next to me, but it was not until a couple of years later that I knew what a short, delicious distance it was from my upholstered chair to the one next to me, and it was not till over forty years later that my unspoken, perhaps even unconscious fantasy of the ideal movie partner materialized.

Steve had often invited colleagues to attend screenings with him. At first I was simply one of several friends who would meet him outside the multiplex and accompany him as he flashed his press card and strode past a line of dozens, sometimes hundreds of hopefuls waiting for a seat in exchange for their free passes. We sat — as we still do — in the choice seats reserved for the press. And although it was many months before our arms crossed over the arm rest’s barrier, even early on we would stand outside the theater late into the evening, talking and talking about the movie. Now we squeeze fingers as the credits begin, and grin and snuggle during especially moving scenes. At home we watch screeners sent to Steve by the film companies, comfy on the sofa after dinner, curled up together with no arm rest between us at all.

Portrait of Glinda in Glinda of Oz
BY Frank L. Baum
ILLUSTRATED BY Jonathan R. Neill
(Reilly & Lee, 1920)

But when I saw The Wizard of Oz, even though my little sister sat right next to me with — was it my mother or my father? — one of my parents on the other side, I might as well have been adrift in a vast outer-spatial theater of absolute darkness. And even if someone like Steve had been reassuringly beside me, The Wizard of Oz would not have been “only a movie.” From its opening moments, the film held me in thrall. Running to prepare for a storm was hauntingly familiar: dust storms often blew into Phoenix from the surrounding desert. My mother would race from room to room as soon as she spotted the moving brown wall of dust, screaming, “Hurry, close the windows, close them tight, hurry, hurry.” Still, with the windows latched as tightly as we could manage, every sill would be layered with brown dirt, every tabletop and bookshelf covered. There was no way to keep all that blown dust outside the small rectangle of our two-bedroom tract house. My mother’s shrill concern for haste struck me as panic — for all I knew, we just might blow away.