I Gave It Away: Days and Nights at Vinegar Hill Theatre

When I arrived in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1966, it was snowing a blizzard. None of the taxis were running, and I walked the mile to housing in a light coat and Capezio flats.

Adult unpreparedness trailed me during these graduate school years, as my attempts to secure a degree in history--then English--then drama--did not work out. Nothing took. I did find a husband and became the mother of two children by the age of twenty five. Meanwhile I modeled for Art school classes, hostess and managed the Gaslight Restaurant, and waited for my life to begin. Then one day my husband Chief came home and said, "Honey, I've found a building."

It was an aging motorcycle showroom located on the edge of Charlottesville's old downtown. We decided to buy it and to transform it into our dream business--an independent movie theatre. We named it after the nearby African American neighborhood that had recently been urban renewed--Vinegar Hill.

VHT, as it came to be known, opened on Valentine's Day of 1976. For the next thirty years it would be a center of Charlottesville's downtown life and the center of my life too. I learned how to operate a film projector, how to make the town's best popcorn, how to clean a lobby in ten minutes, the elements of crowd control.

My marriage failed, and I learned what it was like to be a woman alone in business. Love and Work--that's what Freud says life is all about. While working very hard to program and manage the theatre I looked just as hard for someone to love, and, as my story reveals, I eventually found him.