Trouble at Home Depot, Ron?: The only problem I have there is that half of the people who work there have no idea where anything is...

Kinda slow at the table these days, so I'll post more of what I've been writing about growing up:

"Sometime around the mid or late 40's, The Apollo Theater changed its name to The Hitching Post and featured an exclusive diet of westerns. The theater itself was low and squatty. That wasn't as obvious from the outside because there were apartments above it, but when you walked in to take a seat, you realized how low the ceiling was. Even then, they had managed to squeeze in a balcony at the back. When the theater was used for vaudeville, I'm sure that the low celing didn't create a serious problem, but as a movie theater, it had its drawbacks. Because the projection booth was in the back wall behind the balcony and the cut-out opening was no more than 5 feet above the floor of the balcony, you had to duck (if you were more than 5 feet tall) when you walked in front of the projector or have a silhouette of your head projected onto the screen. That meant that while you were watching the movie, it was regularly interrupted by shadows: either unintentionally projected or from kids holding their hands over their heads and making shadow puppets on the screen. Of course, as soon as a kid started doing it there was such an uproar from all the other kids in the theater that if he didn't stop, he'd be taking his life into his own hands.

The other change that accurred was, because they knew the movie was always going to be a western, kids brought their cap guns with them. During the shoot-outs on screen, half the kids in the theater were
firing their cap guns at the bad guys and with such a low ceiling and poor ventilation, after a couple of shoot-outs a low cloud would settle over the audience. The sound of all the cap guns shooting, with the low ceiling was a little deafening, too. The shoot-outs ended up taking on a reality that was never equalled on the screen."