We went to the Sag Harbor Cinema recently, twice as a matter of fact, and in leaving that first time I said to Mary that we’d never again have to go to New York City, the utterly redone cinema affording every civilized comfort. My only caveat, other than the absence of that seductive moldy smell the old Sag Harbor movie house had, was that the seats in the first theater we were in didn’t give an inch. You had to sit up straight, which for a sloucher used to hunching his entire working life was discomfiting.
The seats in the cinema’s second theater we were in a few days later made up for it, though. You could really slouch in those seats, really splay out. It was almost reminiscent of the Dream Theater in Monterey, California, whose seats were almost like beds, but the two movies we saw there, as Mary reminds me, were the most boring we’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something, for I generally go wild for boring movies.
But I don’t mean to cavil: The Sag Harbor Cinema, a phoenix risen from the ashes if there ever was one, is a wonder, as is the village itself, whose rows of neat white houses glisten in the sun.
Come to think of it, our two Sag Harbor Cinema visits, to see “The Worst Person in the World” and “Licorice Pizza,” each arresting, though in quite different ways, were our first in two years. I sense that we, all of us, are at long last beginning to come out of our cocoons — the timing of which is assuredly ironic considering the war crimes Putin’s committing in Ukraine. That people the world over, in Russia too, have come together to condemn and to resist such viciousness is heartening. You do, though, continue to wonder, with Buckminster Fuller, whether brains or brawn will win out.