Benjamin couldn't believe it - the Stadium, his favorite neighborhood movie theater, had closed its doors. The Stadium, with its beautiful curtains lit with a brilliant wash of rainbow colors. The Stadium - where Benjamin had first tasted buttered popcorn and Flicks and Bon-Bons and frozen U-No Bars. The Stadium, where he'd seen so many wonderful movies, where he'd sat in his tenth-row aisle-seat for as long as he could remember, where Susan Pomeroy had first scratched the inside of his arm, where he'd sat with Paul Daley seeing movie after movie, where he'd seen the glories of VistaVision and Cinemascope and Technicolor and heard the glories of Stereophonic Sound, where he'd gone on adventures with cowboys and Indians and adventurers and plunderers and heroes and villains, where he'd gone on a voyage with Sinbad, where he'd journeyed to the center of the earth, where he'd traveled on a time machine to the future, where he'd seen those blonde children with the weird eyes, where he'd visited other worlds, other lands, and met the most wonderful characters and gotten lost in hundreds of movie moments that he could recall as if he'd seen them all yesterday. But now there would be no more movie moments at the Stadium because Temple B'nai David had bought the Stadium and taken away Benjamin's palace of dreams forever.
They were quite sudden, the tears in Benjamin's eyes. They came out of nowhere and they fell silently on his face while he stared at the dark marquee. He stood there for quite some time, then he walked home.
BK - Kritzer Time
