My husband and I went with some friends to see the 1923 version of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Lon Chaney…the original Lon Chaney stars. Silent and sepia, accompanied by a Robert Morton theater organ (installed in 1928), the organist Clark Wilson played an exceptional score that felt so natural we forgot the film was entirely silent.
Happy place…
I have a deep fondness for silent films. I could say I always liked them but I came to love them in 1994 after the birth of my second daughter. I had to go back to work after six weeks. Taking six weeks off for a birth was frowned upon back then. They couldn’t deny the leave but you had to use your vacation and sick leave balances for the leave, assuming you had a balance of course, or you would not get paid. Lovely time, well before FMLA was a glimmer in the eye of the workers. And then there was the back-handed, indirect disapproval for being gone so long…it was just a baby after all…
I was able to work a deal to take half salary for a period of time so I could come home in the afternoon. I really needed it, I had had a terrible delivery that led to an emergency C-section. I wasn’t really ready to go back after six weeks frankly. There are physical repercussions to that delivery to this day.
So while on half salary/part-time hours, I could pick up my baby from the sitter, get a bottle ready, turn on the TV to the channel playing old films and have a sit. For a period of time the channel ran silent movies which would come on just as I would settle in. The warm, soothing sepia tones with the vintage fonts that with barely enough dialogue to get you by, welcome because it demanded so little of my attention. I fed the baby to Greta Garbo, Rudolph Valentino, Baby Peggy expressing, mugging, emoting to evocative music. Guess it wasn’t really silent but it was…
A happy place…
Khatzkel Did It 