Letter From America: What's In A Seat?
This week Ronnie Bray tells a short story - a delicious tale that will leave you chuckling for the rest of the day.
Read also in Open Writing chapters from Ronnie's autobiography. Click on A Shout From The Attic in the menu on his page.
It was dark when I went in and the usherette was off somewhere to the side seeing to some rowdy ten-year-olds, so I had to make my way to my seat all alone. That wasn’t as easy as it sounds, because I have this condition where my irises don’t behave the way they should and so even a normal day almost blinds me and I have to wear dark glasses so that I can find my way anywhere. This particular day was the brightest and warmest of the northern summer days that England had that particular year, so when I got into the cinema during the intermission I could hardly see anything at all.
Stuffing my ticket untorn into my jacket pocket I felt my way down the rows of seats, just touching my hands along their backs to feel if they were occupied. Every one of them was, and not being able to see along the rows, because my eyes had not accommodated to the dimness, I kept moving forward. I passed a couple of breaks in the seating where patrons could change sides, but it was too risky being purblind to take a chance at crossing into the vast gloom of the auditorium, so I continued my descent down the sloping carpet feeling my way.
Eventually, after the third break I felt a small, partition at about mid-thigh. I could feel no shoulders in front of it, so I moved slowly and cautiously along the row feeling for a seat. Some seats must have been taken out because there was a considerable gap before I found an upholstered bench. It was unoccupied, so, with a sigh of relief, I sat down and waited for the film to begin, quietly unwrapping the first of my quarter of a pound of Quality Street, subconsciously threatening to enjoy them all as fast as I could. I always ate chocolates fast in the cinema because once I dropped a caramel crème and never found it, so I could not risk another loss of that calibre.
Barely had I finished the first and was pulling on the rustling ends of what promised to be a chocolate Brazil nut – Oh, deepjoy! – when a hand roughly grabbed my shoulder. "That’s my seat," gruffed the hand, shaking me as it spoke.
"You wish!" I retorted, using a phrase I had heard on an American television programme.
"It’s my seat!" emphasised the hand, shaking me more roughly, "and you had better get out of it."
I am not an aggressive chap, but after all the difficulty I had endured to find the seat in the first place, and with the likelihood of me finding another one in almost total darkness without causing a melee in the theatre running at nil or less, I stood on principle by staying put, declaring, "Here I sit, and I’m not moving for anyone!"
The hand spoke with sullen resignation. "Alright," said the hand that had from out the enveloping gloom faintly developed a new dimension, so that by peering to my right I could see it was attached to an arm, and the arm was indistinctly attached to a torso that had something that somewhat resembled the head of a man atop of it. The front of the torso appeared to have a white front complete with a dark bow tie such as was worn by toffs just below where I surmised the chin – if it had a chin – would be. "Alright," repeated the combination of hand, arm, and torso, but chiefly the tie, "when the organ comes up, YOU play it!"
Copyright © Ronnie Bray
Other stories at:
http://www.2theheart.com/author_ronnie_bray
http://www.meridianmagazine.com/voices/011024summer.html
