point, and then the king of all shows, The Lone Ranger, came on at six.
Nothing came between anyone in my family and The Lone Ranger. We moved on into the nighttime realm of the more dangerous shows, shows I call dangerous because they scared me out of my wits.
The Inner Sanctum so traumatized me that I couldn't listen to it after a certain age. But I was also caught unawares by episodes of Suspense, or The Lux Radio Theatre. And even The Big Story could pretty much drive me right out of my head.
What all these shows shared, of course, was that they were narratives being conveyed to us by voices - stories being enacted and told without visual images and certainly without any experience of printed words.
I entered into complete little worlds with these radio shows and emerged from them to enter into more worlds as the day and the night went on.
Weekends brought the big entertainment programs like Burns and Allen, or The Bob Hope Show, or The Jack Benny Program, and though these were amusing and everybody gathered for them, they didn't have the narrative pull of the
"story" shows, and the story shows shaped my idea of what a story was, and how important it was.
Either that happened or I simply responded to stories more than anything else.
There was certainly music pouring out of the radio, and it was invariably melodic and gentle. Songs like "Lavender Blue (Dilly Dilly)" or "You're Like a Plaintive Melody, That Never Lets Me Be" were being sung by substantial voices.
And I loved all this, but the stories were the key experience for me. When I could lock on to the events of a story, I was happy, or scared, depending on what those elements were.
During these years, we also went to the movies at a small neighborhood theater on Baronne Street two blocks away.
Other than the church, no other place is as vivid to me in retrospect as the Grenada Theater.
Yet the earliest films I recall, I saw downtown in spectacular movie palaces that were fantasies in themselves with great carpeted staircases, huge balconies, and even marble statues in the lobby and on the mezzanine floor.
The first film I recall seeing was Hamlet. We were in the balcony, my mother and my sister and I, and my mother was explaining to me what was happening as Hamlet's father was poisoned by his brother. The Ghost was talking. The film was in black-and-white and the images of the murder were fuzzy because it was something the Ghost was describing. The only other scene I recall from this movie was the scene of Ophelia floating away in her madness on a raft of flowers in a stream. It puzzled me very much that she didn't wake up when she fell into the water. I recall arguing about this. It seemed absurd that she simply slipped into the water, speaking soft words and gazing at the sky, and drowned.
Other early movies included Casablanca, of which I recall only the final scene between Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart as they talked beside the plane. I thought it was a dull film. I'd seen, though I don't remember it, a film about the Marx Brothers in Casablanca and I was disappointed that they weren't in this Casablanca film as well. The other notable scene I recall is from Caesar and Cleopatra, in which Cleopatra had herself smuggled on board Caesar's ship, wrapped in a rug. That was a fascinating scene to behold:
Vivien Leigh, the gorgeous Cleopatra with her long black hair and curling arm bracelets, coming out of that rug to the amazement of Claude Rains.
It's no accident that I remembered these scenes all my life.
It's no accident that I remember listening to the radio so vividly, that I can recall names and even bits of stories from the radio.
Again, all of this was knowledge coming to me audibly and not shaped by printed words. The motion pictures were immense and vital like the church and did not involve the printed word.
And in this preliterate world in which my interests and tendencies and faith were formed, there was a profound connection between narrative, art, music, and faith.
It never occurred to me or anyone I knew that the radio shows were profane, for example, and the church was sacred.
The radio shows and the worlds they revealed were as much a part of life as church. Same with films. My mother loved movies, and she told us stories