Saturday Matinees, 1961

Dear Diary,

Time for a stroll down memory lane I think.  This is the old Hudson Theater in the town where I grew up.  I so enjoyed going to see movies and, until I began dating, that usually meant a Saturday afternoon matinee.  For about a dollar you could see a movie and have some popcorn and a drink.  I saw lots of movies there but the one that I remember most was West Side Story which came out in the fall of 1961.  What a wonderful film, it is still one of my favorites. (I've added a photo of the movie poster as an extra.)

I was in the seventh grade and at a particularly impressionable age.  I thought it just about the most romantic movie I ever hoped to see.  I also remember that my English teacher  told us how the story was inspired by Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.  We read the play and I became a Shakespeare fan as well.  I also thought that New York City was a wild and exotic place but it would be many years before I actually visited the Big Apple.

54 years later, when I was visiting Dutchess County, New York researching my family I ran into a woman whose husband was an actor who played in West Side Story and we had a good talk.  Your past is never always in the past.  It pops into your present from time to time and that is a good thing, at least for me. (You can read about that encounter here.)