It started with the first movie I saw in a big theater, when I was a little girl. The aisle long and mysterious. The seats plush red. The theater very dark, and then the screen lit up. Bambi. There he was, wide-eyed and curious, sniffing Flower amid the wildflowers, spinning splay-legged on the ice with Thumper, dashing through the forest with his mother and father. The screen was so big and full. It was astonishing.

But then, there’s a gun shot. And my heart stopped beating, too. No childhood storybook of my own, no bedtime reading by my parents had prepared me for that twist in the story. I was shocked, surprised, horrified. I cried!

Well, at five-years-old, it’s to be expected. But that’s what true movie-magic is—a transformational experience, feeling fully engrossed, fully engaged in a story line as if it were real. I was hooked.

Movie Love Leads to the Champlain Valley Film Society

My love of movies carried through college where I threaded 35-millimeter film through the projector in the music hall to show movies to my classmates for $2. Then the summer job as the manager of a movie theater in Bolton Landing on Lake George where my dinner was often popcorn. Later, I worked in publishing, and got advance movie passes and went to small, private studio screening rooms in NYC skyscrapers to see films before they hit the theaters. Now as a volunteer for the Champlain Valley Film Society. Summer job, business perk or as a volunteer, the movies call to me.

I have never studied film. I am not an expert on some director’s oeuvre. I don’t really want to know how they do that special effect. I simply seek the experience of a dark theatre, the big screen, and the movie magic of another world. Take me away! To the woods with a freckled fawn and a bashful skunk I go!

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• Champlain Valley Film Society Winter 2014 Schedule (www.essexonlakechamplain.com)
• Whallonsburg Grange Winter 2014 Lyceum Series (www.essexonlakechamplain.com)