One reason why St. Louis is a great place to live

I recently read a departing Post-Dispatch staffer's blog complaining about what a horrible place St. Louis is and how he can't wait to move back to Boston because he's originally from New England and supposedly, everything is better in Boston. There were many fallacies in his logic and I don't want to specifically address them here, but Saturday night I thought of his blog post as I sat in the Tivoli theater watching the midnight showing of Back to the Future. I remember thinking that, at that moment, there was no place on earth I would rather be than in St. Louis.

As I watched the 1955 high school dance scene, I wondered if anyone else in the theater caught the irony that was occurring on screen when Marty McFly plays Johnny B. Goode while backstage injured guitarist Marvin Berry calls his cousin Chuck on the phone and says, "I think this is the new sound you've been looking for," and holds up the handset. Only in St. Louis can you sit in a theater watching that scene just a few short blocks away from Blueberry Hill's Duck Room where the legend himself performs to this day in a room named for him (although, sadly, not as often as he did 10 or so years ago) and where Johnnie Johnson's star and Berry's shines on the sidewalk outside. There is just so much history in this place known as the Gateway to the West.

The reason I wondered whether anyone else caught the irony was I noticed that by the looks of many moviegoers, some of them could have been seeing the film for the first time. In fact, I was the oldest person in the group of people I was with. Some of them hadn't even been born when the movie was first released and most of the rest of our group had been mere toddlers.

Among the other things I noticed while watching the movie was the fact that, in the beginning, Doc Brown says he plans to travel 25 years into the future. That would be 2010. It blew me away to think that Robert Zemeckis imagined that we would be driving flying cars by 2010! It made me want to see the second film again to see if any of his predictions regarding the future were accurate.

When the movie first started playing, I wasn't sure if I was going to enjoy it with everyone shouting out comments and applauding during certain scenes of the film. After all, I wasn't there to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But I ended up enjoying that part of it and found myself applauding and reacting right along with the crowd. It's been a long time since I laughed that hard watching anything.

Watching the movie also made me sad for times long gone. Several mentions were obsolete. Some faded away almost immediately after 1985 like Tab and Pepsi Free. Other fads took longer to die out like big hair, sleeveless jackets, stonewashed jeans. Some 24 years later, 1985 almost seems as simple and uncomplicated as 1955 did in 1985. Apparently, if you believe the movie, all a high schooler wanted was for his band to get a legitimate gig, his dad to get a backbone and stand up to his bully of a boss, and a Toyota four-wheel-drive pickup. It was a time when terrorists were Libyans driving a beat-up VW bus and when they get ready to use the grenade launcher, it was more of a joke than a reality. It was a time when you didn't have to pass through a metal detector in order to go to class and when Huey Lewis and the News and Van Halen were constantly on the radio. It was a time when cell phones weren't stuck to everyone's ears while they were driving down the highway and a time when no one had heard of the Internet or facebook or twitter. It was a time when a BlackBerry was still a fruit and reality TV was the evening news.

I couldn't even begin to guess what the people one or two generations behind me thought of the movie. How foreign a lot of it must have seemed to them, just like 1955 seemed to me when I first saw the movie as a pre-teen.

They don't make movies like that anymore and I was glad that I saw it again on the big screen. It was a worthwhile trip down memory lane and I almost regretted having to come back to the future.