Yesterday, I wrote about what I had to go through to get a job at the Mayan Theatre, which actually wasn't difficult. They were doing plenty of hiring because of the Christmas season and several of the employees were only there for a brief period of time as they were college students just coming in to make some extra cash. They would need people to stay on after the first of the year.
I arrived on Saturday, 12/23/89, for my first day on the job. I was scheduled to come in 15 minutes before the theatre opened. Kaz, the assistant manager, told me I would be working the front door. It was my job to tear the tickets and direct people to the correct auditorium. When I started working there, the three movies we were showing were "My Left Foot," "Crimes and Misdemeanors" and "The Ten Commandments." Each movie had a different colored ticket, so I would know which auditorium to send people to. I was also responsible for keeping the lobby area clean after all the movies had started.
A woman named Toz was working the box office. (I should point something out here: I had a crush on just about every woman who worked at the theatre, some more severely than others. I will have individual articles on those more severe ones later.) Toz was really cute and had a spunky personality. I got to spend a lot of time talking to her during my first shift, but found out during that time that she had a boyfriend. (I remember one time when she was arguing with her boyfriend over the phone while she was in the box office, but didn't realize she had her microphone on. Everybody in the street could hear her end of the conversation.)
There was also one woman working the concession stand and another working the Mayan Cafe upstairs, which offered espresso coffee drinks. Eventually, I would learn to work all three positions. They were definitely more challenging than working the front door.
After the first set of shows let in. Kaz had me fill out the new hire paperwork and I read and signed the employee handbook. The strange thing about the employee handbook was that I did not get to keep a copy. It was 20 pages long. I can't believe they expected us to memorize its entire contents. She then showed me the schedule for the next week. I didn't have to work Christmas Eve, but I did have to work the evening shift on Christmas Day. Considering what happened the previous year, I wasn't going to put up a fuss about it. At least I would get to spend Christmas morning with my parents as they had come up to Denver to visit (although my Mom still complained about me having to work on Christmas).
There was one incident that occurred during the intermission of "The Ten Commandments." A couple of customers came out and were yelling at each other. I guess one of them was making audible comments during the movie and the other was telling him to keep his mouth shut. This was a bad situation because there were less than ten people in the theatre. It didn't escalate any further and no one else stepped in to try to settle things down.
The rest of the shift was rather uneventful. When I came back on Christmas, I found things to be entirely different. There were a whole lot more customers at the theatre than there were on Saturday. Some other person was managing when I arrived. His name was Mr. I, and he was the Manager of the Esquire Theatre. He was filling in because Mr. R was on vacation that week. Basically, Kaz was the only person managing that entire week and was lucky enough to get someone to fill in for the Christmas matinees.
I wasn't aware of this until a couple of weeks working for the Mayan, but the management staff consisted of three tiers: There was the House Manager, which was Mr. R. There was the Assistant Manager, which was Kaz. And then there was the Chief of Staff, which was a woman named Aniz. I didn't get to meet Aniz until months later. When I was hired, Aniz had been on a leave of absence and eventually never returned to the position. Aniz also worked at the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver. Interestingly enough, I had applied for a job there and got a letter of rejection from her after I had started working at the Mayan.
This same management setup was in place at the Esquire and the Ogden, although both those theatres shared the same Chief of Staff. The manager of the Ogden was Mr. W. There was a rank higher than the House Managers in Denver. It was the City Manager. Her name was Maud. She oversaw all three theatres in Denver. Above her was the District Manager. The one for our district was Ald and he was in charge of all the theatres in the Southwestern part of the country.
I have to set up the details in this hierarchy in preparation for the next few posts, because there were a lot of changes that took place very soon after I started working for Landmark, some of them in my favor. Aside from Aniz deciding not to come back, Kaz announced that she was leaving at the end of January.
But I will provide updates for a couple of people I wrote about in this article: Over the course of the next month that I worked there, I found out some interesting stuff about Kaz, which everyone else had already figured out: You could always tell what kind of mood Kaz was in by whether or not she wore her glasses. When the glasses were on, she was the humorless woman I first encountered. When she wasn't wearing the glasses, she was very warm and acted like she had been best friends with you for years. I was also told that her state of mind could be affected by whether she had bothered to brush her hair on any particular day, but I never got to experience that first hand.
After she left, she would still show up every once in a while to see movies. The weird thing was that every time she saw me, she would act somewhat flirtatious. If it had happened a few more times, I probably would have considered her a Mistop. I have no idea where she is now, as her name is common.
As for Toz, she eventually became the principal of an elementary school in Aurora. We are now friends on Facebook. When I found her profile, I wasn't certain it was her because her photo showed her with a mole on the opposite side of her face from what I remembered (and had a photograph of). However, when I saw her picture on the school website, the mole was on the correct side. Toz married an airline pilot and they adopted a little girl a couple of years ago.
So, more on the exciting world of projecting images in the air tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment