watching movies in a dead mall

tonight b. & did something a little unusual for a saturday nite.  we took a long walk thru the near empty corridors of the Sunrise Mall located on sunrise blvd in Citrus Heights, an incorporated municipality of sacramento county.  the Sunrise Mall was a destination for families & teens in the 1980s.  it was one of the places to go hang with your friends.  the mall had a video arcade, & a movie theater.  however, the last couple of decades have not been kind to the mall.  b. told me that he looked up the occupancy rate which stands somewhere north of 40%.  that is a devastating statistic.  so b. suggested we walk thru the mall before it is either transmogrified into another thing, or dead cold on the slab.  

i love decay, decrepitude, mess & all thing of popular culture including dead & dying malls.  i said yes to b.'s idea before he finished his sentence.  malls today are no longer, at least for most young people, places to be & be seen.  they are barely places to buy things in.  yet, there are stores inside the mall clinging to life & shoppers determined to find their bargains.  but one wing of the Sunrise Mall was void of all retail.  that wing housed the movie theater.

i remember trying to get into an R rated movie when i was around 13 at this theater.  i was denied!  imagine that.  i think the movie was a kung fu flick.  i was tall for my age with a lot of scroungy facial hair so often box offices would sell me tickets for R rated movies without a blink of hesitation. but not at that theater.  later i did get to see many many movies there including taking nick to the flicks when he was old enough to pay attention to the screen.

i don't know when the Sunrise Theater turned into a discount second-run feature house.  even during the video home rental boom of the 1980s second-run feature houses were fairly common.  sure you can rent the movie you wanted to see.  but you can pay a couple of bucks for a ticket to see that same movie on the big screen.  when you are young, broke & needed a destination for a date these houses were perfect.

same goes for any young family who wanted to take the kids out for a movie but couldn't or didn't want to donate a kidney to pay for the tix & the treats at the concession stand.  let your kids go to the movies, said frank o'hara.  the Sunrise Theater was a great place to do just that thing.  

it's dead.  the mall is dying.  i miss the theater even tho i've not been in a movie theater for a long while even before the pandemic.  & i think the last movie i took nick to see at the Sunrise Theater was wall-e [2008].  that can't be right since he'd have been only four.  i'm sure we've seen some flicks after 2008 when nick was a little older.  such is my movie-going life that my younger years blur into each other.  

the Sunrise Theater is dead.  long live the Sunrise Theater.