By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page is about scale and astonishment, using cities, movie screens, and early memory to insist on the reality of a childhood encounter with cinema.
The image of a screen bigger than you are turns cinema into a way of thinking about childhood perception, exposure, and the shock of entering spaces that exceed your own size. The handwritten theatre replacement makes the medium itself unstable, while `It was not a dream` anchors the memory as fact.
A memory of cinema and scale: 'I have been to some cities', and 'When THE THEATRE CAME TO A CLOSE / MOVIE'. The speaker turns to what she could not hold - 'not being / able to watch a movie / that is / Bigger than you are / When you just show up' - then anchors it in childhood, 'when I was a little more / than an infant', 'When my Dad took me to an old fashioned / screen', insisting 'It was not a dream'. This reading remains provisional because the overwritten movie/theatre phrasing and other handwritten replacements are unresolved; source spellings and the scan-visible capitalization are preserved as written.