The Last Picture Show

How long does it take for the smell of decades of daily popcorn to fade from the street in front of the neighborhood movie house? Our local cinema, the Hollywood, in Vancouver's Kitsilano, closed its doors forever one Sunday last April. And today when I walked past, the smell of popcorn was still there. As long as it lingers on the Hollywood's block of Broadway, it's easy to imagine, that nothing has really changed, that next Monday, as so many Mondays over the past decade, I'll buy my $6 dollar double bill ticket, my bag of popcorn and settle into one of the Hollywood's comfortable red velvet seats. The sign on the cinema's marquee is a gentle reminder that it's all over. "Farewell friends. Thanks for 75 great years."
On the last night, they asked us all to stand and sing "God Save the King" just as it had been sung 75 years ago when the Hollywood opened. And a full house of all ages stood and sang heartily. It was the least we could do. The actor MC'ing the event sang, "Smile". We'd need that over the next couple of hours as we watched the film chosen for the final show, "Cinema Paradiso", that deeply sentimental, melancholy Italian tale of the glory days of a local movie house and the changing world that brought them to an end. The changing world that has brought one of Vancouver's last local theatres to an end, is one of high rise condominiums, rising rents, a city in search of 'densifying' in order to squeeze more taxes our of the populace, and a public that is choosing to watch its movies at home.

The Hollywood sits or sat on the most villagey end of Broadway. Tall, shady trees stand higher than most of the businesses up at this far west end of this main city artery. There is something of the true far west in the eccentric single storey shops and restaurants here: Kids Books, Artigiano, East is East, Baguette & Co, a few Chinese greengrocers, Calhoun's, Parthenon, Olympic, Ace Cycles, Used Book store. And in the middle of them all stood our very own Cinema Paradiso, our Last Picture Show. It had one of those Art Deco columns and the "stripes" , the paint was peeling but the glowing red and blue neon was still beautiful, particularly in the small cursive sign over the marquee that read "Pick o' the Plays".
Rumour has it that soon Broadway's bucolic, tree-lined, single storey world will disappear. Some whisper that the city plans to run a sky train along the middle, others say that the whole block will be torn down to be replaced by condos - most likely in the 'grey and glass' style so prized by local architects and probably, poignantly called, "The Hollywood."

I'd heard the rumours but didn't think it would come so soon. Like all human beings, I like to believe that my sources of pleasure and comfort will go on forever - even small, slightly shabby pleasures like sitting in the Hollywood in Vancouver-damp clothes on a Monday night, wondering whether I should have paid an extra 50 cents and got real butter on my popcorn. And wondering whether I'd have the stamina to sit through the double bill and only managing it once.
An architect friend of mine was also a regular. When I discussed the closing with him, he said, "Well, I'd love to say come along to the last show with me but frankly that's something I want to do on my own. I want to sit in my usual seat, eat my usual popcorn and just say a quiet goodbye to the old place alone."
Movies are, after all, a very solitary experience that we share with others. So he went on his night and I went on mine. And we said goodbye to the kitschy mini-chandelier in the tiny foyer, to the box office that looks out on the street with its fading postcards of French New Wave movies - Brigitte Bardot in "Le Mepris". And to Alice the 92 year old grandmother who has sat in that box-office for so many years, selling those tiny little pink and blue paper tickets that have been demoted to cloakrooms and raffles in the rest of the world.

Last night as she posed for her umpteenth photo, clad from head to toe in scarlet, she whispered to me, "Oh I would hate to be a movie star. They have to do this all the time you know."
And good bye to the big clock to the left of the screen. I could always gauge the power of a movie by the number of times I looked at that clock. During "Lost in Translation", halfway through the film I concluded that the clock might actually be more entertaining.

I've commented on this before but North American culture is not fond of farewells. Sadness does not sit well with a people programmed for positivity, for new starts and looking towards the future. But surely, feeling the loss of something or someone is part of being human. This insistence on being perky and upbeat at all times and at any cost diminishes us as people. And so at the Hollywood last night, we called on the Sicilians to help us grieve our very real loss. You could hear the sobs and the rummaging for extra Kleenex as the Italians gathered in their piazza to watch their Paradiso be demolished.

But afterwards, as we poured out into the street one last time, eyes were wiped dry and everyone was brisk and upbeat...and a little at a loss as to what to do or say. For a few brief moments, so many of us were taking pictures of that wonderful old marquee and the red and blue neon sign, that we spilled onto the road and held up the traffic. But it was only for a few seconds. The order was established, the Broadway buses could pass and for the final time, we all made our way home from the local movie house.

Return to Vancouver

On my first morning back in Vancouver, I turn right out of the house in Kitsilano, look north and there they are -seemingly at the end of the street: Vancouver's three great mountains - from left to right - Cypress (or Hollyburn) Grouse and Seymour -all snow-covered on this rainy morning down in the city.

I've left the mayhem of London - of Ealing to be precise. I'm no longer one of the teeming crowd that stream out of Ealing Broadway station every minute of every day. I'm far from the smells of the falafel shop on the corner and the gloom of the shopping precinct where every week seem to bring another vacated premise. I've exchanged the possibility of a London day - a quick hop on the Central Line and in 25 minutes, there's the British Museum - for the green, peaceful streets of Kitsilano - once Vancouver's answer to the hippy Haight Ashbury in San Francisco.

Now the evening offers "Marley and Me" at the family-run Art Deco, Hollywood Cinema on Broadway - $6 on Monday for a double bill - Marley is followed by "The Day the Earth Stood Still." It's a far cry from trying for a ten quid standing place at the Royal Opera House but I'm relieved to be gone. Nobody here is braying about dead reality tv performers. Nobody cares about the bloated over-paid likes of Jonathan Ross or Fred Goodwin.

When I shop, I don't have to rely on Mr Sainsbury, Mr Waitrose, Mr Tesco or Mr Asda to feed me. Broadway, the main street round the corner boasts half a dozen excellent Chinese greengrocers - mangos at 50p and the owners all know me and ask how I am. Coffee at Whole Foods costs 90p. Add to that, a chocolate-raspberry tart and it's five minutes of paradise, Crab cakes at the Seven Seas fish store are as good as in any restaurant and cost less than £2. Terra Breads in the same block sells a walnut bread that surpasses any I've tasted in Paris.

And all the while the snow falls on those mountains and the forests of great cedars and pines, the Pacific laps at the end of the street and there's not a red-top tabloid newspaper in sight.

The Last Summer of the Bed and Breakfast

On August 16th, Graeme's  House - at 22 years, one of the oldest inns in Kitsilano, closed - probably forever.

For the past 4 summers I have cleaned the place. Four summers before that I was at a dark and scary crossroads: mother dead, career flagging, love lost. I did the 21st century rounds of seers and sages. If one of them had predicted that in the very near future I would cross an ocean, land in one of the world’s loveliest settings for a city and be cleaning toilets every morning of every summer for four summers, I would have asked for my future back.

When Graeme (and yes she’s a woman - it’s a Scottish thing apparently)approached me with this proposition, she described it as ‘doing a Monica Dickens’. Graeme’s generation is probably the last to know what that is. Monica Dickens was a granddaughter of Charles; she took on humble jobs like cleaning to gather copy and write a lot of novels.

I did not want to write a novel about cleaning or cleaners. I did not want to write a novel about Bed and Breakfasts. I did need some quick extra money though, and one morning in early May found me following Graeme obediently through each of the four rooms learning how to make a bed with hospital corners - tuck in the bottom of the sheet, pull up a lower corner until it is the shape of a bishop’s mitre, tuck that in. The bed will look a lot like a neatly wrapped package. The guest, one must assume, will be overcome with an urge to become the contents.

The falling blossoms of an apple tree out on the deck signalled the beginning of my work each year. The proliferation of berries on the mountain ash in the back yard heralded the end. Sometime in September, I would look out of the window in the Rosedale Room and see that a scarlet breath of autumn had blown through the maple on 11th Avenue. By then there would be two or three guests in the house as opposed to the eight or nine that would squeeze around the kitchen table of an August weekend. 

The guests came from  all over the globe from Australia to  Finland, Switzerland to Taiwan. They would stumble in jet-lagged from a flight from Heathrow, alight from a taxi after an Alaskan cruise or drive up Waterloo Street straight from the Rockies in their camping car. They were physicists, orthopedic surgeons, psychics,  ecologists, neurologists, peripatetic grandparents, poets, lobbyists, toddlers, teenagers and new-born babies. They were very  rarely Republican. We did have two con men (not together) and one drunk but in a 22 year stint, they are barely worth a mention.

They were all invariably delighted with their stay. Other B&Bs may have been bigger, or have offered sherry at twilight or eggs Benedict for breakfast but very few had Graeme's gift for making people just plain happy to be in her home.

"We are all in this dance together," Graeme would say as she got up at 5am to serve breakfast to some early ferry passengers or allowed a trio of twenty something Finnish mountain bikers to take over the kitchen  and  fill the genteel Cornflower Room with a mountain of clothes and, what looked like armour, for their week long stay. 

"This is my life's work", remarked this former art teacher, English teacher, practicing therapist and interior designer one morning.  I paused, dustbuster in hand, ready to argue that she was far too clever, too qualified to be baking muffins and making beds. But I had failed to understand what Graeme had understood: that true hospitality - giving shelter, a room at an inn is one of the most  viscerally important and loving roles on the planet.

Graeme also gave shelter to the venerable Puhd - the black cat who wandered into her house during a blizzard and stayed to meet and greet and occasionally sleep with the guests for 21 years.  Puhd left us 3 years ago and can never be replaced  but in lush, verdant Vancouver where coyotes roam the lanes and bald eagles can sometimes be glimpsed in the sky over Graeme's house, the wild life endures.  Hummingbirds will continue to whirr round the petunias on the deck. Our neighbourhood raccoon will pursue his ambition to steal the back doormat.

But when the last of the guests wheeled their suitcase under the floral arch and down the garden path one Saturday morning last August something was lost forever in this lovely little Vancouver neighbourhood of Kitsilano.

 In this perenially perky North American culture, there is not much room for sadness, there is little room for the sense of endings. If something ends, we must rush to see what is about to begin. If one door closes, then by golly, another one had better be opening before we've had time to catch our breath. We might nod in the direction of 'closure' but we don't really care for the bittersweet emotions of an end. Melancholy, that autumnal sense of the extraordinary sadness of our human condition - as soon as we live and love something, anything, it is already slipping away from us - rarely makes an appearance on Oprah.

Well, this summer, something quite lovely ended on Waterloo St. I never thought, when I was grumbling my way through the bathrooms, dustbuster and toilet brush in hand, that I would miss these mundane tasks but they proved, like the B&B and like Graeme herself, to be rather good for the soul. So, time to mark  a moment of sadness and say goodbye to the hospital corners, the colour co-ordinated towels, the cheese muffins and the blueberry scones, to the endless slivers of left-over soap and the bottomless pot of coffee; to Puhd and the racoon and to all those strangers who came up the steps to sleep and snore and dream for just a few short hours before going on their way. Now Graeme goes on her's - off to some other adventure I am sure.  But her lovely house will be much missed.  Farewell Graeme's House - it was a privilege and a joy to know you.