On Broadway

I painted this picture in my painting class, but I did it without too much help, just the extra set of eyes noticing that the angle of the windows was inaccurate, and the light in the distance was colored the same as the closer light.  The source was a photograph I took standing out on Broadway waiting for the Last Remaining Seats showing of All About Eve at the Los Angeles Theater.  I think when I edited my photograph of the painting to adjust for the the indoor lighting I may have lightened it up too much.  It's dusk.  The sky is a deeper blue.  The sun is still shining on the tops of the buildings, but night has fallen at street level.

The Last Remaining Seats is a program of the Los Angeles Conservancy, where older classic movies are shown on big screens in the historic movie houses in Los Angeles.  I think my husband and I got onto this in its early years, almost accidentally, because my son, rather inexplicably, fell in love with Laurel and Hardy.  Parents are willing to go out of their way to witness their small boy laughing with reckless abandon.  Broadway in Los Angeles was lined with theaters at one time and some of them still remain, some restored and some repurposed.   Just a few years ago, Broadway was mainly a shopping district filled with new immigrants and cheap electronics.  Trendy hipster restaurants are popping up now.

I'm an older person now.  I don't even wait around for people to ask me what it was like when I was young.  I tell them.  I didn't like history when I was a kid.  The first time I was interested in history, my grandparents were already dead.  And I thought about how the world must have looked to them, as World War I began or as cars took to the roads.