Of course we also made our own popcorn at home.

We’d get a clean pot with a lid. We’d pour in corn kernels from the bag, put the lid on, and turn on the fire. I think we sometimes put oil in the bottom of the pan so the popped corn wouldn’t stick and burn. I remember burned popped corn we had to fish out and throw away, and black stains on the bottom of the pot. The lid kept the steam in, and kept the popcorn from jumping out of the pot.

Then you put some salt and mix it in. Otherwise it’s bland. Then you take melted butter and pour as much as you want.

When it’s cooking, you listen for the pop. That’s why they call it popcorn. The first pop, followed by scattered pops, and then a barrage of pops like a machine gun. Then you lift the lid to see if it’s done, all popped, and you take it off the fire, ready for the butter. It’s a process.

Some people don’t like butter on it. They think it will make them fat. That’s their problem.

The popping sound is like when you boil cranberries to make cranberry sauce. They pop the same way with the same sound, pop, until they’re all popped out and you add sugar, instead of salt and butter which goes on popcorn.

Popcorn is better at the movies. Don’t ask me why. It’s maybe probably because of the movies which make it an event, and because someone else is doing all the work. And it’s fun to watch, as they put unpopped kernels into the popper at the top of a glass enclosure and then electricity heats them up and they start to pop and peek out and lift the lid and fall in spurts to the growing pile in the glass enclosure. Then the counter person scoops some up and puts it in a bag or carton or bucket or however they sell it.

Sometimes they have a butter machine and they drizzle butter at request.

Sometimes, like at the Laemmle Theater in Pasadena, or the Academy Theater also in Pasadena further this way on Colorado Blvd., you’d take your popcorn over to a little stand where the butter machine is and pump as much as you want over your popcorn. When they’re honest about it, they admit that it’s not real butter, and even the sign says butter substitute or more often just butter flavor.

When I was young and our family didn’t have much money, we still went to the movies, partly because we didn’t have a television. You could get in for a quarter. Then you bought popcorn. I think they used to use real butter in those days. I seem to remember them putting cubes of butter into the machine to melt.

We knew that if you just put butter on the top layer, when you ate it off, the lower layers were dry. So, at the theater, which was family friendly, we’d ask them to fill the container half way, put butter, then fill the rest of the way to the top and more butter. That way you had butter all the way to the bottom, just the way we liked it. No, it didn’t make us fat.

We walked to the movies. The whole family, for an outing, or just us kids because we didn’t need to be with parents unless it was a PG movie.

Our movie theater was the Garfield Theater, on Garfield Avenue in Alhambra. It was just a few blocks over on Newmark, then turn right on Garfield, which was a city street with not just houses. Right there when you turned the corner was the Doctor’s Office where our family Doctor had his office. I didn’t go there very often because I was usually disgustingly healthy as a child. I did go there once where they took some of my blood and matched it to a chart to see how red it was. I was 95%. I was proud of my red. I have good blood. Everybody says so. It fights disease all over my body.

That was the Doctor my Father went to, often on his own. He had polyps in his nose. One time he took me with him and I sat and watched the Doctor reach in his nose with some kind of long clipper tongs, and he clipped and dragged out a pretty long bloody slug like thing he said was a polyp. He and my Father talked like friends and made the point that this was only charged as an office visit, but it was really surgery which was usually done at the hospital but would have costed way more. I don’t know if doctors are like that nowadays. They used to make house-calls.

Anyway, further down the street on the other side, was the Garfield Theater, looking like a theater with a marquee and posters and everything, by itself with no buildings on either side closer than a few feet, so it stood out as itself a real theater. They showed double features, so you got your money’s worth. Later, they even sometimes had a triple bill, to boost the audience. That’s where I saw The Vikings with Kirk Douglas as the mean Viking with a patch over his eye that was torn out by a falcon that Tony Curtis unleashed at him. I liked the way Kirk Douglas danced light-footed along the oars of the Viking boat, like a gymnast. I always thought Burt Lancaster was the gymnastic one because he had been in the circus.

Anyway, when I was grown up and married with a baby, I needed a part-time job to make a little more money and they hired me to be Assistant Manager at Stage One, the foreign “art film” independent movie theater in Riverside, around the corner from the big famous Fox Theater that showed the Hollywood movies.

My job was simple and complex. I had the keys and unlocked the door. I let the cashier girl into her kiosk where she sold the tickets, and at the end of the night I counted the money and filled out forms and wrapped the bills in a rubber band and did a money drop into the safe for which none of has a key, with a sign that said so to discourage anybody who wanted to rob us because none of us could open the safe, only the armed guards from Brinks or whoever it was who came by on schedule and opened the safe under my watchful eye and put the money into their armored truck and took it to the bank.

My early daily duty, I got there at 6:00 pm sharp, tired after teaching all day, after unlocking the door, was to get the concession stand ready. We sometimes called it the candy counter, and another girl stood behind it and sold candy, and drinks from the soda fountain I had to be sure we always had full containers for, like barrels out of sight with the proper carbon dioxide level under pressure to keep the drinks sparkly fizzy. Those drink barrels were heavy. I was checking dials like an astronaut in a space ship in the movies of that time.

And, of course, the popcorn machine. We were in the new age where the popcorn was delivered to us in big plastic bags, already popped. I’d open the bag, empty it into the glass enclosure which I had to empty and sweep out at the end of the day as one of the concluding acts of my shift, making everything ship shape. I turned on the light to heat the popcorn, then tasted it to see if it needed more salt. We had a shaker available for customers who wanted more. And then I’d turn on the butter machine to heat up the butter flavor. None of it was really complex, but you had to do it right. Throughout the evening while the movie was playing inside, you might see the candy girl or me munching on popcorn. We wanted to be sure it still tasted fresh. It was free, just part of the job.

So I was kind of a popcorn insider, and that’s almost all I have to say on the subject.

Except for that iconic movie. I don’t remember the name, but I could look it up. It came out when they started making movies about teenagers that were written by and directed by teenagers, or guys who never grew up beyond adolescence.

They were about the teen scene, what kids did to hang out, often just after graduation from high school. Since I had grown up poor, shy, no car, it was a world unknown to me, though I could understand it pretty quick, just not relate.

Anyway, this one movie, apparently the scene was iconic, some guys on a date with some girls, were at the movies, and one bought a box of popcorn and made a hole at the bottom. He put it in his lap, unzipped, and put his weenie up through the hole into the popcorn. The plan was that when the girl reached in for popcorn, she would grab his weenie. It was supposed to be ha ha ha. It was not part of my experience, but I understood immediately, and then mentally re-wrote the scene because as is it was demeaning to the girl, and by extrapolation, to all girls.

I didn’t think that way about girls as objects, toys. I had been ready to fall in love, and when I did, I by-passed adolescence altogether in a single leap.

So I mentally re-wrote the scene, had the girl grab and twist the weenie, reducing the bad boy to pain on his knees begging for mercy from a backfired joke, then the police come to arrest the bad boy for sexual assault.

And I hope the day will come soon in my lifetime when girls and women get their rightful place in democracy. I am more than distressed by the current leaders of government, those shallow adolescents who never grew up.

And that’s all I want to say for now about popcorn in the movies.