mondojohnson

I am warm and fuzzy with nostalgia after having seen the photos at the 8th Street Playhouse group on Facebook. I worked at the famous cult movie house as manager during my last couple years at NYU.

We chain smoked cigarettes, drank gallons of coffee and spent an awful lot of time doing our glam hair and makeup. We’d often use the theatre after-hours for parties and various other shenanigans, including using it as a set for my roommate Bob Burn’s koo-koo film school klassic “Heavy Cream”.

The Playhouse belonged to a different era of NYC — there were ashtrays in the seats and pot-smoking in the theatre was less controversial than sneaking in your own can of soda. I had a strange road to hoe, as at the time I was “straight-edge”, sober as a judge, while everyone else was pretty much continually tripping or slipping off to the opium den that was the projection room. I was conflicted between my managerial duties and my deep desire to be the “cool boss….”

Happily, the cool boss usually prevailed. Trying to fight the crazy, self-indulgent creativity was like yelling at a hurricane… and the mayhem was what made the place “the epicenter of cool” (to quote Jim Farber) at a time when we were all going to die of AIDS at any moment.