Much of my undergraduate career at Yale College was spent inside the film projection booth at 101 Linsley-Chittenden Hall on the Old Campus. The classroom-turned-screening room was the headquarters of the Yale Film Society, of which I was a member, factotum and primary projectionist. We ran screenings of films on an almost daily basis, films that our group of young sixties’ critics deemed to be the best: American auteur cinema, French nouvelle vague, and Italian neo-realism. The Film Society was also enormously lucrative, a cash cow. I made more money there than I have since since graduation. Hey, this Ivy League stuff is pretty good.
[Side exposition of auteur theory]
The extensive screening schedule required a lot of unhealthy time spent inside that rickety old unventilated booth. I often had to bring my girlfriends with me; it was the only time we got to spend together. We got a wonderful education in film studies. But a lot of it was repetitive and tedious. Great for a serious student of the movies, watching the same film several times in one day. It didn’t take long before Cleo, my girl friend at the time, got bored and decided to take matters into her own hands.
The twin Kalart-Victor 16 millimeter projectors sat on a large heavy platform behind the big picture window facing the screen on the other side of the auditorium. Two tall stools allowed the projectionist to sit when he was not needed to manage the projectors, mostly for focussing and switching from one reel of film to the next, from one projector to the other. The finished reel was then rewound on the back shelf of the booth, and the next reel queued up on the available projector.
After a few nights of these repetitive showings of the same film, it was understandable that Cleo should get tired of just keeping me company in the booth. On this particular night, the film was Blake Edwards’s The Great Race. I had fed her at the dining hall before bringing her to the show, but she had started fidgeting at the start of the second show. I noticed that she had left the booth quietly, figuring that she was still hungry or needed to go to the bathroom down the hall. But I was coming up to a reel change in a few minutes, and needed to focus on that exclusively. The reel was ending with the pie-throwing scene in the film. Suddenly, under the platform, I felt her hands on my legs.
–Cleo, stop it. What are you doing? She growled something muffled under the table, like some wild animal locked in with me in the booth.
By then, she had undone my belt and unzipped my jeans. She started rummaging around inside, and found what she was looking for. Since in those days we all thought it was cool not to wear underpants, she had matters in hand in no time at all.
[The following paragraph is encrypted in order to protect the reader’s tender sensibilities….or to protect Cleo’s reputation, in view of her deliciously immodest behavior…
One could crack the code (it’s not that hard). If you don’t want to make the effort, please write to Che Boludo at our address, damfino@kingofjesters.com, and we will send you the decryption key for a modest $ 19.95, all inclusive.
Censored text below:
End of censored text]
–Not a word, please!
Outside the booth, there was buzzing and shuffling, knocking on the door, auditorium lights on, then finally off. Cleo and I continued what she had started. At about three in the morning, we restored order in the booth and left quietly out into the Old Campus and a cold, crisp winter night.
Alas, the rest was not history. Rather, history was not made that night. I didn’t see much of Cleo after the end of that school year. I ran away, as I always do. The show was over. The End.
Who are you and what do you want?