Closing Credits

The other day, the HR department at my workplace sent an all-staff email conveying the sad and shocking news that a big name in our organization—the American Physical Therapy Association—and in the physical therapy profession in general, had died in a car accident in Costa Rica. He was a pugnacious former board member who tended to be a polarizing figure. My friend Maryann, who left my workplace a few years ago but used to cover a lot of board meetings and other association functions as a writer and editor, first texted me, upon receiving the news, that this man had been  “loved and hated,” then corrected herself, in a subsequent text, that “hated” had been too strong a word.

I knew what she meant. You hate people who murder your relatives or force you to quit your job rather than spend another day working for them. You don’t really hate people who are as passionate about your profession as you are. You especially don’t hate them if they’re more passionate about your profession than you are.

My dealings with this guy had been pretty limited. I’d interviewed him for articles a few times. What I remember is that he answered my questions and responded to my emails, which is pretty much everything I like in anyone I interview. What I don’t remember is anything I talked to him about. I have a lousy memory in general, but it’s particularly bad when it comes to stuff I write about for work. I’m all-in during the research, interviewing, outlining and writing process. I work hard to ensure that my articles are accessible, useful and well-written. But it’s my job, as opposed to my life. Which is why, once each story has been put to bed—once it’s been published and my interaction with it is done—I forget pretty much everything about it. I’m astonished sometimes when I reread a piece I wrote just a year or two ago, sometimes favorably so and other times not. They seem either far too smart for me to have written them, or, more rarely but quite depressingly, far too careless.  

Anyway, I checked back yesterday on the tribute page my employer had set up for Mr Recently Deceased. There were many, many tributes. I read for several minutes, then scrolled down to the bottom to see how long that would take. I kept scrolling, and scrolling. For a while it seemed like one of those deals on Yahoo News where you never get to the end because it adds yesterday’s celebrity blurbs and disaster roundups, then those of the day before that. (To the last syllable of recorded time, as Shakespeare might have said of the bottomless nature of gossip about the Kardashians.)

Suffice it to say, this guy was well loved by a whole lot his peers. And surely not hated by many. Not hate-hate, anyway. “That’s nice,” I thought as I scanned the tributes. I’m on the fence about the afterlife, but I feel pretty certain that the deceased aren’t sitting on a cloud somewhere reading posthumous tributes through their Earth-vision goggles. I always find strange those paid blurbs in the obituary section of the newspaper in which the deceased is addressed directly by the family and assured how much he or she has been missed by Mom and Uncle Fred over the course of the past two, five or 10 years. If there is an afterlife, how much of it is spent, I have to wonder, reading the small type at the back of the Metro section?

No, what I was thinking was, that’s nice for the dead guy’s family, to know how highly people thought of their son, brother, father, husband, whatever. I know nothing about this particular dead man’s personal life. Maryann texted me something about there having been another guy in the car, who was injured in the accident. She called that guy by his first name, and clearly thought I’d recognize the name and know what his relationship with the deceased had been. Had Mr Recently Deceased been gay, then? I hadn’t a clue, and I couldn’t care less—except for the fact that it speaks well of APTA if the guy felt comfortable being “out” as a board member and a prominent voice of the profession.

Less than 24 hours after the email from HR, I received the news in an email on my home PC that my favorite movie theater will be closing at the end of this month. That news hit me hard, even though the only shocking thing about it was that the tiny, rather shabby triplex of theaters near Georgetown had lasted for four and a half years in a competitive DC marketplace that increasingly is offering bigger, flashier alternative venues in which to view the kinds of quirky indie films, thoughtful foreign movies and probing documentaries that have been West End Cinema’s stock in trade. The short message from “Josh” on the email cited “business realities.” A subsequent article in the Washington Post’s Weekend section revealed his last name—Levin—and added a few quotes and details about the “radical changes” in the “exhibition landscape” that had occurred since the venue’s debut in the fall of 2010.

I loved going to West End and had a whole routine around it. I knew where and when to park in Georgetown so as not to get a ticket—most times. I always went to matinees—I hate crowded theaters—and I liked walking past the fancy hotels along M Street NW to get to the theaters at the corner of 23rd. It made me feel very cosmopolitan, somehow, even though I was just passing through. One of the two same guys always was there, taking tickets and serving popcorn and checking the heat in the dumpy boxlike spaces (more like projection rooms than “theaters”). They were low-budget jacks of all trades. Josh must’ve been one of them.. I never felt comfortable making conversation with him or the other guy. But I like to think I was recognized, and my patronage appreciated.

Most recently, I saw the wonderful Belgian film Two Days, One Night there, and some of the Oscar nominees for Best Short Film: Documentary. I almost always came solo, but a few months ago Lynn accompanied me to a documentary about a pioneer of yoga in the United States. Determined to see all eight best picture nominees before last month’s academy awards, I saw several at West End.

It was a comfortable place. I prefer sitting up close in theaters so I don’t have a sea of jabbering heads in front of me. At West End, the screens were small enough that there was no danger of my eyes getting lost in enlarged pixels. I sometimes sat in the very first row.

The juxtaposition of these two deaths—the board member’s and the theater’s—struck me immediately, and has been on my mind for the past few days. For a roughly equal amount of time, I’ve felt like I wanted to blog about it but have wondered what my “angle” should be. I’m now nearing the end of this post without quite having come to a conclusion.

I in no way mean to minimize the death of the board member—whose name, by the way, was Steve Levine, and who no doubt was a great man in his professional sphere in additional to being a comfort and joy to his intimates. I am saying that I’ll miss West End way more than the frankly not at all that I’ll miss Steve, but that is all context and is absolutely nothing personal. Part of me thinks I ought to pay tribute to West End on its Facebook page, in the manner that APTA members paid tribute to Steve on the associaton’s dedicated page, except that I still think Facebook is a stupid time-suck and I refuse to join it.

Perhaps this is trite, but if there’s a common thread here, it’s that if someone or something truly touches you, there’s never a good time to see it die. It’s always too soon, and it’s always irreplaceable. All the more so if it’s pugnacious and if it seemed to delight in fighting the good fight. Especially then.