This past weekend, I was trained in the movie business. Our local theater is run as a co-op, I’m a member of the board, and I bravely volunteered to assist in occasionally assisting in running the theater. This meant going in to operate the projector and help with the concessions. Easy, right? Push a few buttons, relieve some of our helpful volunteers, no sweat.

Except it turns out to be a non-trivial exercise. The theater is an old building that has been clumsily revamped to handle a modern movie projection system. The first step is running around to various closets and hidey-holes to flip circuit breakers on, power up various computers and devices, gather up a pair of cash boxes and count money and deliver them to the ticket booth and concessions, and turn on the two projectors, and wait. These are run by old computers that take ages to start up and feature antique Windows software to run everything.

The projector software really does everything for you. It shows all the ads and movies on a tight schedule, and once it’s running you can just ignore the projection until the movie is done. That sounds great, but it’s more like the autopilot on a private plane. It does the job it’s designed to do, but before you can push the button to switch on the autopilot, you still have to do all the pre-flight checks and turn on the engine and get the plane down the runway and into the air. It’s much more complicated than I imagined.

So I’ve gone through the procedure once — it wasn’t enough. I’m going to have to do more run throughs under supervision before I can fly solo.

I didn’t have a chance to watch the movies. I was able to catch the end of The Bride, which was confusing and loud. The star of the weekend was Super Mario Galaxy, which was packing the house — we had a record attendance. I did learn the most of the money made is from concessions, which I’ll have to learn how to do next. This is the first time in my entire life that I’ve worked in retail, and I’m mystified by it.

But the glamor!