I think I wrote this one in college. It was inspired by my love of the real-life serials of the 1930's and 40's and by the popularity of family comedies in the 80's and 90's like Hocus Pocus and Home Alone that had kids foiling bad guys and sometimes solving crimes. One of my college writing teachers insisted that what happens to the kids here is too coincidental and sudden...but some of those 90's movies were kind of like that, too. At any rate, I think it's pretty cute, especially if you have grade-school-age girls who like old-fashioned adventure.
The Movie Theater Adventure
By Emma Redmer
I never had an adventure until my tenth birthday in 1944. Sally, Amanda and I spent the whole afternoon at a movie for the cost of a quarter. We brought lunch and sat in the huge theater. The movie showing that day was a terrific musical, “Cover Girl,” and the serial was a mystery about a lost key and an heiress. The cartoon was Woody Woodpecker. We laughed a lot and ate tons of food. Sally sang along with Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth, but she had to stop because she annoyed customers.
The three of us had a lot in common. We loved peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and always brought them to the movies with us. We liked listening to adventure shows on the radio. We loved movies where the good guys won and the bad guys lost and the hero got the girl. We all had relatives who went to war and our mothers volunteered for the Red Cross in their spare time. We sat in the same row at school. We called ourselves the Three Comrades after the three main characters of the radio show “I Love a Mystery,” who were best friends and detectives. We wanted to be detectives and adventurers when we grew up, too, like the heroes in comics and movies and on radio.
Amanda brought three slices of Italian rum cake from her house for my birthday and we snuck it into the Royal Theater that afternoon. I never figured out how Amanda’s mom managed to make rum cake when both sugar and rum were hard to come by, but we had it on my birthday. Sally nearly upset her popcorn when the bad guy in the serial looked like he was going to slice the good guy into little pieces, but I reminded her that it was all fake and the good guy would be fine next week, anyway. They always found a way to get the hero out of the situation at the last minute.
Our adventure started after the serial, during the newsreel. None of us were particularly fond of the news. It was depressing. The announcer never said anything that we hadn’t learned in school or read in letters from our brothers and uncles and cousins who were involved in the fighting. We packed up early and decided to go back to the tree house in my backyard and play pirates or Superman.
The Royal was the fanciest and most expensive movie theater in town and the three of us had gone there as a special treat. Mom called it a relic from her childhood. It had velvet seats, red carpets, lots of fancy angels and pretty carvings, potted palms, and uniformed ushers who called us "miss."
“They oughta have a map of this place,” muttered Amanda as we wandered up and down corridors, looking for the main entrance. “It’s like a maze.”
“We’ll never get out of here,” whimpered Sally, who was trying not to cry. “We’ll be trapped in here forever and ever and ever and I’ll never see Mom and my cat again!”
“Sally,” I protested, “we are not that lost. I’ll bet we’re just two steps from the entrance right now!”
Amanda frowned. “Ok, Miss Smarty-Pants Beth Bates, prove it!” She pointed to the nearest door. “Open this door and see if it’s the way out.”
I couldn’t resist a challenge like that without looking like a yellow-bellied coward, so I flung open the door and nearly tripped over a messy pile of boxes and reels. A man was tied to a chair with a handkerchief stuffed in his mouth. He was making noises and trying to loosen the ropes that bound his wrists and ankles. Sally and I untied him and Sally got the cloth out.
Amanda looked around the room. There were boxes and papers strewn all over. A huge steel box that squatted in one corner was jutting open. “What happened here?” she asked.
The man looked frightened. “You girls shouldn’t be here. Go back to the matinee! They could be back any second.”
“The newsreel is running right now,” I explained. “We got lost and thought this was an exit.”
Sally turned as white as a sheet. “Who’s they?”
“They are the people who robbed this theater. They held me up and made me give them the contents of the safe.” The man nodded at us and shook our hands. “I’m Richard Caulingsford, the theater accountant, and this is the main office. Those men stole the several thousand dollars that we intended to give to various charities for the war effort.”
“Can we call the police?” I asked excitedly. I’d never called the police before. Amanda and Sally looked hopeful.
Mr. Caulingsford shook his head no. “Thank you, but you girls have done more than enough already. I can take over from here.” He gave us directions to the front of the theater and almost pushed us out the door. “And be careful, because they may still be in the building,” he warned as we left the office.
Something didn’t seem quite right to me. Sally grinned as we exited into the warm sunlight, relieved that we’d come out of that alive. Amanda looked irritated. “I don’t like this,” she grumbled. “I think that guy was lying.”
I nodded. “Me too. Something stinks like my little brother’s dirty socks.”
Sally caught our drift. “The man wasn’t really tied that tightly. He could have gotten out long before we found him.”
“And he was awful quick to get rid of us,” Amanda added.
I snapped my fingers. “Maybe he wasn’t who he said he was. Maybe he was an Axis spy looking for information, like in the Spy Smasher comic I read last month.”
Amanda snorted. “What would a spy be doing tied up in a small town movie theater? He probably just didn’t want to explain us to his boss.”
“Or maybe he’s a Nazi,” I continued, ignoring Amanda’s sarcasm, “and he’s going to use the movies to play evil messages from the enemy and control our minds and make us do Hitler’s bidding.”
Sally put her hand over my forehead the way Mom does when I have a fever. “Beth, are you feeling ok? You sure you didn’t eat too much rum cake?”
I pushed her hand away. “Sally, I’m fine. I just don’t think...”
I don’t quite know what happened after that. I remember Sally putting her hand on my head and me starting to tell her that I was fine and the next thing I knew I was laying under a man on the ground. The man wore a black trenchcoat and hat and his face was covered with a mask. He quickly got up, but I’d noticed something else. A bag of money had spilled onto the ground. I gasped. “You’re they! I mean, you’re the people who robbed Mr. Caulingsford!”
Amanda was pounding on the back of another man, but he just pushed her aside. “You’re gonna pay for this, you know!” Amanda screamed. “That money was for soldiers and nurses and tanks, not for you!” The men hadn't noticed Sally, who screamed and took off. Rabbits scare her. I hoped she was doing something useful, like getting the theater manager to call the police.
One of the men clamped his hand over her mouth. “Looks like we got a live one here, Louie,” he sneered.
Louie, the guy who fell over me, got up and grabbed his money. “George, they’re just kids. What trouble can kids cause?”
“Plenty,” George snapped. “They know about the dough. They could squeal to the cops.”
“They won’t if they know what’s good for them,” whispered another voice that emerged from the shadows. It was Mr. Caulingsford. He didn’t look like an accountant now. He looked truly evil, like one of the master villains from the serials, the kind who had names like the Crimson Ghost and the Black Tiger. “After all, little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. If they’re smart little girls, they’ll come with us or they won’t talk.”
“We’ll never go with you!” exclaimed Amanda from under George’s huge hand, but I shushed her.
“Amanda, quiet. After all, we’re only little girls. What could we do to big, strong men like you?” I fluttered my eyelashes and looked cute. “Mr. Caulingsford, could you be so kind as to tell us how you did that, seeing as we’re going to spend a lot of time together?”
Mr. Caulingsford was halfway through his explanation when the police arrived on the scene and took them to the station. It seems that he and his buddies had planned this caper for a long time. He’d found out when his boss was going to be gone for the week and then had his friends to arrive dressed like burglars and tie him to make him look innocent. He’d join his friends later, after the last show of the night.
“I went back to the Royal and told an usher what was going on. He didn’t believe me, so I said to go look at the office. He called the police from there,” Sally told us later, after the police officers took Mr. Caulingsford and his goons away.
The Royal’s owner gave us free tickets to the show of our choice and supported our school scrap drive the minute we asked him. Amanda asked me the day of the scrap drive if I wanted to see the new Batman serial with her, but I said no. I’d had enough adventure.
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