This is Where We Came In

   You may have heard someone say, "This is where we came in," when something sounds or feels familiar.  If you are from my generation you know where that expression started.

   In pre-television days, you went to the movies for an evening's entertainment.  Although they only cost ten cents for kids and about thirty-five cents for adults, it was depression, and you had to get a full evening out of every admission you paid, so movies ran "double features". One admission bought you two features, a short subject, and a newsreel.  One feature was the advertised, star-cast big budget film, the A movie, and the second was a low budget, B, film.  The B film was shot on a shoestring with newcomer actors, or faded over the hill has beens, shot on location with one take per scene.  If no one blew his lines, it was "cut - print that - next set up - quiet on the set"

   The movie ran continously all day.  You went in at your convenience, found your seat in the dark, and began watching the story unfold from whereever it happened to be.  When the story ended, you saw the newsreel, which was interesting because there was no nightly news on TV, a short comedy or animated feature, and then plunged into the second film. You watched the second story unfold and finish.  Before you were through applauding, the first feature began again. And this is when your movie watching skills were tested.

   You had to remember the characters and their actions from the early part of the evening, and put them together with what had gone before, which you were now watching.  You had to edit in your head, and make sense of the story you had already seen a couple of hours earlier. That was the skill we early movie goers developed.

   Sooner or later things began to be familiar, and you whispered to your  companions, "This is where we came in."

   Then you took a sort of straw poll.  If the movie was intriguing enough, you might vote to stay and watch the ending a second time.  More often, you put the pieces of the story together in your head, gathered your coats in the dark and departed. 

   Carrying this skill into the twenty first century, those of us over seventy, turn on the television at our convenience, break into the story on the screen whereever it may be, and follow it to the end.  Alas, it does not rescreen later in the evening.  We have to "make up" the first part of the story.  Our movie watching skills help us here, but often we have to wait until re-runs begin at the end of the season. 

   During the re-run season we often come upon the first part of a story we saw the end of a month or two before.  We follow along, and sometimes we get that old-old "This is where we came in" feeling.