Deborah Lipp

My ex is a confirmed night owl. At some point, he wanted to coin a term for daylight people, e.g. the opposite of night owls. I tried “normal” but he rejected that and came up with larks.

But the urge to divide people into owls and larks is just one of the many unimportant but ubiquitous examples of the dualism of our culture: Day or night, good or evil, male or female, right or wrong, we divide divide divide and never see the gray areas.

I am not a morning person. Just. Not. I wake up slowly and I don’t do well when the alarm goes off much before 7. Conversation before coffee is sluggish and reluctant.

But I get most of my work done in the morning. I clean the bathroom while I’m getting ready for work. I leave the dishes in the sink after dinner and wash them the next morning while making coffee. Then I get to work, get myself more coffee, and am at peak productivity before lunch.

I could continue with the boring details. I’m most social in the evenings. I have a dead zone around 2 p.m. I’m usually up past midnight but can’t write productively my last hour or so awake. The point is, I’m neither an owl nor a lark. I’m me. I have my own cycles and my own interaction with light, food intake, and the other things that affect circadian rhythms.

And so does everyone else. It’s just one more box we don’t have to squeeze into.

Thirty years ago, my friend Russell and I ventured across the Bay to San Francisco, where we rode a bus for miles–miles!–deep into the heart of the Terra they call Incognita, all so we could wait hours in line for a movie that in that innocent era was simply called “Star Wars”.

The theater was the Coronet, and it was the only theater in the Bay Area showing the 70mm version. That made it Ground Zero for the fanatics. If you were watching the news back then and saw stories about the Star Wars phenomenon where they talked to fans waiting in line, odds are pretty good you saw the Coronet.

Over the years, I saw a dozen or so other movies there–some memorable (Fellowship of the Ring), some not so much (um…I forget). It wasn’t spectacular like the Paramount or ornate like the Alhambra, but it had a nice deco interior and it was a big single-screen theater where you felt like you were Watching A Movie.

Now I live in the neighborhood that seemed so foreign to me. Lucas has driven the Star Wars franchise into the ground with a prequel trilogy so bad it tarnishes the originals. And as of last Sunday morning, this is what was left of the Coronet.

It closed two years ago, as had most of the other single-screen theaters in San Francisco. I was sad at the time, got over it, moved on. The building stood empty, in limbo. Then a couple of weeks ago I rode by on the bus and saw that the sign was down and they had knocked down one of the walls, and it hit me all over again.

You live any place too long and this is what happens: the geography of your memory is dismantled piece by piece. You know it’ll happen but that doesn’t make it any easier. For me, the Coronet was a big piece.

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Hey, we’ll keep this going as long as people are interested.

The current question (and it’s a good one) is from Amy: Name the order in which the contestants of Slayerfest were taken out of commission.