As I mentioned in yesterday's post, there was a lot of upheaval among the management position at the three Denver theatres in the Landmark chain fairly soon after I was hired. Kaz left the Mayan's Assistant Manager at the end of January 1990. Chief of Staff Aniz (who I never worked under) had gone on a leave of absence and I guess it took her several months to decide she wasn't coming back.
These weren't the only major changes that were taking place in Denver. Maud, who was the City Manager had been promoted to District Manager. Landmark had re-done its districts and created a new position and promoted her to it. Maud's district would be based in Denver. I don't know who made this decision, but Mynd, who was someone she knew when she was working for Landmark in Texas, was transferred from her House Manager position in Dallas to move to Denver to be our City Manager.
Lerd, who had been serving as the Chief of Staff at the Esquire and the Ogden was promoted to the Assistant Manager position at the Mayan. When I first met him, I thought he was older than me, but it turned out he was 21 years old at the time. (I was 25, but he was also surprised to find out I was older than him.) He was a good Assistant Manager, but he had a tendency to get real snitty sometimes.
One of the employees at the Esquire was promoted to the Chief of Staff position. I heard Mr. R talking about how that person made a remark about finally getting to move up after three months of pushing popcorn. Mr. R said, "Some of us had to wait a LOT longer than that!" I hoped that I would get that same opportunity after three months. Then I wouldn't have to go looking for another job.
For about two months, it was just Mr. R and Lerd managing the Mayan. I don't know how I had heard about this, but Mr. R had offered the Chief of Staff position to Lez. This was the same woman complaining about her paycheck when I first came in to apply. She turned it down. A couple of days after that, I was working in the Mayan Cafe upstairs. Toz came out of the Manager's office and collected the money from my till. I thought, "Okay, so she's the Chief of Staff." But I guess she decided to turn down the offer. Sometime after that, I had gone into the projection booth (which was right behind the downstairs concession stand) just to see the projector at work. Lerd came in and asked what I was doing. I said I was just observing the projector. He asked me if Mr. R had said talked to me. I asked what and he replied that they had the Chief of Staff position, but he didn't go into any more details.
On Sunday, 04/01/90, I was scheduled to work the evening shift. A few hours before I was to come in, Lerd called me at home and asked me to come in at an earlier time. I arrived, put on a apron and was ready to go to work. Lerd told me to put the apron back and to just stand and observe him at the front door. After a while, he asked me, "Do you know why I'm showing you this?" I asked, "Is it because I'm due for a promotion?" "That's exactly right."
That day happened to be the day that the Federal minimum wage increased, so I was very happy that I only had to be on minimum wage for just a little more than three months before I started making more than the going rate. That meant I didn't have to go out and find another job. One of the bad things about Landmark was that the only way you could make more than minimum wage was to become a member of the management team. They had no system for regular increases. Basically, you had to beg for an increase and the request would have to go all the way to the District Manager, who had to give approval.
I was trained on how to thread and run the projectors and how to close out the tills at the end of the day. I learned it all pretty quickly, and within a week, I was on my own managing the theatre. During my first night, one of the employees called and asked for Mr. R. I told him he wasn't there. Then he asked for Lerd. I told him he wasn't there, either. "Well, then who's managing?" "I am!" "Ooooh, so you're the new Chief of Staff." I guess a lot of people were surprised that I had ascended to that level so quickly. I did have a major disaster that night in that the 7pm showing of "Cinema Paradiso" had the the print fall off the spool toward the end of the film. I couldn't fix the problem in time for the 9:30pm show, so I had to issue refunds and passes. There were about 30 people in the audience.
But the real challenge came with my first Saturday night closing. With all the upheaval, we lost a lot of our best box office people. I had only been working the box office a couple of weeks, but I took to it swiftly and was one of the best. We had just started training one of the people we recently hired in the box office and he had a really hard time. In fact, I had to take over the box office when it got really busy that night. When we got to the end of the day, we were about $300 short in the box office. I stayed there until 2am, but never could find the missing cash. It's possible that the box office guy accidentally mishandled a lot of the money. Monday morning, Mr. R came from the bank and showed that I had put an extra hundred dollars in one of the deposits. That's nice, but we were still wound up short about two hundred dollars.
A month later, Mr. R announced that he would be leaving the Mayan as he had accepted a transfer to manage a Landmark Theatre in Palo Alto, CA. He would be leaving at the end of May. This, of course, would result in more upheaval, but it also meant there was a chance for me to move up.
Did that happen? I'm going to answer that tomorrow.
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