My first car was my father’s hand-me-down 1967 Chevy Biscayne, the economy version of the Impala: four doors, three on the tree, two enormous bench seats, and zero seatbelts. [OK, there *were* seatbelts, but they had been stuffed under the seat cushions since the day the car left the dealership.] We once fit nine people in that car — four in the front and five in the back — to drive to the Uniondale Mini Cinema.
My friends and I went to the Mini to see rock and roll concert films — Rust Never Sleeps, The Kids Are Alright, Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, The Song Remains the Same, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, Yessongs, and the like. The seats in the Mini were bent, tattered, and uncomfortable; your shoes stuck to the floor; the bathrooms were nasty; but the sound system there was epic and you could party like an animal.
The Mini Cinema was the last business in operation in an abandoned shopping center, a massive stretch of cracked of asphalt surrounded by a 10-foot-tall chain link fence with barbed wire at the top. The long run of fencing was broken by a single, sliding gate that marked the entrance/exit to the desolate parking lot and which was locked tight until 11:00 pm, when the Mini would start getting ready for its midnight shows — the only showtimes it ever had.
The Mini itself wasn’t much to look at either, at least from the outside. You can see from the snapshot in the Photo section that it was pretty nondescript. A squat brick building, tiny little marquee, smoked glass in the doors — hardly even noticeable unless you were looking for it. The drab exterior certainly gave no hint as to who the clientele were or what they would be doing there.
One thing you can’t see in the image is the three gigantic, industrial-strength RubberMaid garbage cans that would be lined up just outside the doors, right before the ticket booth, where you would toss your empties before heading in. Drinking on line — in public — was a given, an expected behavior. We all did it, and lots of the kids there were clearly underage. Why the cops never intervened is beyond me. The crowd at the Mini was the only life that shopping center ever saw. We must have stood out in pretty stark terms, especially near midnight.
It was even better (or worse) once you got inside. Smoking was allowed in movie theaters back then, and everyone I knew smoked. But at the Mini Cinema, we were smoking pot — a lot of it. Again, everyone did it, and this was in the late 70s / early 80s. Somehow we felt protected in the Mini, invincible. Indeed, my good friend Dennis and I once fashioned an 8-inch joint, as thick around as my ring finger, using brightly colored red, white, and blue rolling papers for the occasion. No one in the Mini said a word. Again, I have no idea how the place never got busted. Magic? Bribery? Simple indifference by the police who had better things to do than to bust some bored and already contained suburban kids desperate for good time?
In any event, the Mini was the stage for some truly celebratory/communal rituals. For instance, the Mini hosted the Rocky Horror Picture Show and the thespians who did their simultaneous live-action version (like my friends Carol Thompson and Lisa Stawecki) for *years*. And the rest of us made our own pilgrimages there for quite some time as well. We watched the same concert movies over and over again — movies which, in hindsight, are excruciatingly boring if you are not high — reveling in the music, its sheer volume, each others’ company, and the Mini’s authorized abandon.