Not to be hyperbolic, but the movies have always been a holy place for sweet refuge throughout my somewhat turbulent life.
Even though I was a late bloomer on the first-run movies front—mostly because my family barely had the money for important things like groceries, bills and funerals, let alone entertainment—the movies still found me eventually.
The first time I went to the movies was at a birthday party in 1989 to watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. A year later, I moved to Oklahoma City and walked to Penn Square General Cinema nearly every week. It was my engine of imminent survival.