chase the light

Every week, either Tuesday or Thursday night, we have to change the marquee out front of the mall. The first thing you have to do is figure out what letters you need to use to spell out the new movie on the marquee. Where this gets tricky is you already have a set of letters out there from the old movie. So you use them in figuring out the additional letters you need to take out. What really gets wacky is they’re made of plastic so if you drop one it breaks easily. Then you’re out of that letter and have to drive back to the theater to get another one. Compunding the problem even more is that over a period of time we broke so many letters that at some point there wasn’t enough letters to spell the names right. So a 3 would have to be used backwards to make an E. Or a backward Z for an S. Sometimes you just had to drop letters all together and spell things like “The Colr Prple”. The marquee isn’t very long either so sometimes we have to shorten stuff to the extreme. So Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddies Revenge” has to become 3lm Str33t II. Because we were out of 2’s and E’s. Roman numerals are our friend. See, stuff like that. What a hard job!

Anyway, Mike Karcher, a friend of mine who used to work at the theater, stopped by and went with me to change the marquee out front. I had him narrarate the fun. I had to go out and take down Rocky IV and put up Nightmare on Elm Street. We’re also getting “Black Moon Rising” but keeping “The Jewel of the Nile”.

Click the audio link to enjoy a trip to the marquee with Mike and Chris!