char *(null)="
lyric.theatre
lyric.theatre
From netcom.com!netcomsv!decwrl!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!convex!news.duke.edu!acpub.duke.edu!jfurr Sat May 28 10:59:52 1994
Xref: netcom.com alt.fan.joel-furr:668 rec.arts.prose:1825 alt.folklore.ghost-stories:5145
Path: netcom.com!netcomsv!decwrl!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!convex!news.duke.edu!acpub.duke.edu!jfurr
From: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu (Joel Furr)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.joel-furr,rec.arts.prose,alt.folklore.ghost-stories,bburg.general
Subject: Ghost story
Supersedes: <2rudq5$k1j@news.duke.edu>
Followup-To: alt.fan.joel-furr
Date: 25 May 1994 02:50:41 GMT
Organization: Moderator, alt.config
Lines: 643
Message-ID: <2ruee1$kfj@news.duke.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: bio6.acpub.duke.edu
I wrote this a long time ago -- a non-fiction, chatty account of a cool
old theater. It's not immortal prose but I still get requests for it, so
here's a repost for old times' sake.
The Ghosts of the Lyric:
Part I: The Lyric Theater: An Unusual Place
Part II: The Ghosts of the Lyric
Part III: The Lyric Today
Part I: The Lyric Theater: An Unusual Place
The stories I have to tell you are set at the old Lyric
Theater in downtown Blacksburg, Virginia. The theater
belonged to some friends of mine, the Kelseys, who had owned
various incarnations of the business for decades. When I
was just starting graduate school at Virginia Tech, in 1988,
the theater was past its prime, aging, soon to suffer a
death blow when an eight-screen theater complex opened at a
new mall south of town. Still, the family held out and kept
the place open, both out of pride (I think) and because the
theater seemed to be the only thing keeping Grandfather
Kelsey alive. It was a nice old place, even if the some of
the seats were torn and the floor had a stickiness scrubbing
couldn't completely eliminate, and some nights I would
wander by after class got out at 10:00 p.m. to chat with
Beth Kelsey and her husband Bud Bennett.
Beth had been a classmate of mine in high school, though we
really hadn't become chatting friends until after gradua-
tion. She'd married Bud Bennett, four years her senior, in
the summer of 1988 and the two of them worked days at the
Virginia Tech library and then spent Tuesday, Wednesday, and
Thursday evenings running the theater. They hated the
necessity of spending three evenings a week watching the
meager crowds trickle in and out, but since they worked
unpaid it permitted the theater to stay open a little while
longer. Profitable once, the days of competition with the
eight-screen cineplex at the mall and the burgeoning video-
rental businesses had reduced the Lyric to the point where
the bank account balance spiralled downwards rather than
creeping upwards or staying even. Without the clout to get
the must-see movies, they showed what they could get, often
having to show several also-rans as part of the package that
brought them their rare popular film.
I wondered why the Kelseys kept the place open, since they
knew full well that they would never make a profit again.
One day I asked. Beth explained to me that, to be quite
honest, it was only until her grandfather died. Without the
Lyric, he'd have no reason to exist; even in his advanced
years he would wander down to the theater in the evening and
poke uselessly around for a while before leaving.
Evenings spent chatting with Beth and Bud while we waited
for the late showing of whatever dubious blockbuster they
had that week to finish generally included at least a half
hour of extensive complaining about the Virginia Tech stu-
dents who vandalized the building during the day, when the
University leased the space for large lecture classes. Each
evening's crew would find a few new depredations, whether
it be Coca-Cola syrup emptied out onto the snack counter
floor, or wooden lap-boards shoved up under the carpet, or
graffiti written on the bathroom walls in magic marker. We
called the students "ingrates" out of a sense of irritation
with the casual way they destroyed property that
belonged to people who had never done them any harm. After
Beth and Bud got that out of their systems we'd chat about
life for a while, and then the movie would end and the
twenty or thirty patrons would wander out and we'd close up.
I felt odd about staying after closing with them, worried
that they'd think that I had nowhere else to be, but I did
enjoy talking and truth to tell they were about the only
people outside my cluster of fellow students with whom I did
get to talk on a regular basis. And it was interesting
getting to go in the places most patrons wouldn't even know
existed: the back stairwell that must have been used
decades ago by black theater-goers, the vast empty stage
behind the movie screen where once, long ago, theatrical
plays had been presented; the eerie crawlspace under the
stage where no one had much desire to explore; the boiler
room with Russell's 55-gallon drum of stale popcorn; the odd
crawlspaces ABOVE the projection booth where we found stacks
of 1940's-era phonograph records, hopelessly warped.
There were all manner of little nooks and crannies in the
Lyric building, stuck as it was in the middle of a city
block, part of one huge interconnected building that else-
where had stores on the street level and apartments above.
The Lyric was owned by the Kelseys but the land it sat on
was the property of the HCMF corporation, the local real
estate barons with a finger in every pie and little interest
in preserving a fine old movie theater when there were rent
checks to be cashed. The money that had to be paid to HCMF
was in large part the reason for the perpetual cycle of
weekly losses, and Beth and Bud believed that HCMF would
like nothing better than to take the Lyric and raze it and
replace it with modern apartments, which would probably have
made them a lot of money since the theater was a block from
campus.
Nevertheless, Grandfather Kelsey was still hanging on and
while he was, the Kelseys managed to keep the place open. I
had the vague idea that they had money saved up from the
flush years of decades past and that they were paying the
deficits out of that, but for all I really knew, they were
taking out huge loans each week to keep paying the power
bill. It wasn't the sort of thing I felt comfortable in-
quiring into. So while the place stayed open and the one
dozen or two dozen people per night came in to see the
movies the Lyric had to show, I'd drop by as often as I felt
safe doing and would chatter with Beth and Bud until 11:00
when they'd lock up and I'd help them with closing.
There were certain things that had to be done each evening
and eventually I learned them and was able to help out.
They had to make sure everyone was out of the place, then
lock up. Then Bud would go up to the projection booth and
start the movie feeding off the big platter it had collected
onto and backwards onto another platter for the next show-
ing. Or, if the movie was being shipped out in the morning,
we'd collect it into two massively heavy movie canisters and
lug it down the back stairs to the street entrance. Beth
would go down to the right-side emergency exit passage and
get the piles of wooden lap boards out for the students to
use in classes the next day, and wheel out the overhead
projector and microphone and slide projector and get them
all set up. We'd take all the cups and napkins from the
snack bar and lock them in a closet so the students wouldn't
fill them with soft drink "post mix" (the syrup that gets
combined with soda water to make the actual beverage) and
splash it around, as they had done back in the days when
Beth and Bud didn't know better than to leave the cups
sitting out.
Fortunately, the actual cleaning of the theater was not a
chore we had to do; that was taken care of by an extremely
old, senile man named Russell. Russell came in late at
night, usually long after we left, and would clean up the
spilled candy and popcorn and drinks and clean the restrooms
and all the other distasteful things that one has to do in a
place frequented by sloppy college students. Russell liked
to collect things; Beth and Bud laughed hysterically when it
occurred to them to show me his fifty-five gallon drum full
of stale popcorn. Apparently he took all the leftover
popcorn from the evening's showings and collected it in the
aforementioned drum which he kept in the boiler room, a room
accessed by a mostly-hidden panel located in one of the
emergency exit passageways. Beth had asked him about the
drum-ful of popcorn and Russell had told her that he saved
it up for his "pups." "Pups?" Beth had asked, and Russell
had assured her that the dogs he raised for sale loved to
eat the stale popcorn. Beth never failed to go into connip-
tions if you mentioned Russell's corn-fed "pups."
Russell also collected used drink cups, combs, burned-out
fluorescent light tubes... assortments of all of these would
turn up in closets and storage areas and the back stairwell
to eventually be thrown out by Beth or Bud or one of the
other theater employees. Once, he had retrieved some
burned-out, dusty, singed-looking fluorescent light tubes
from the garbage, had stuck them in a box, marked the box
"new," and placed them safely away in a closet for future
use. Beth and Bud eventually stopped trying to understand
why he did these things; they simply took each newly-found
cache as a pleasant discovery to be examined for possible
actual usefulness and then disposed of once the diagnosis
had come up "negative." Russell never seemed to mind; in
fact, he seemed to be pleased when he noticed the absence of
his prizes and would take it as an impetus to search for new
and even more interesting treasures.
Part II: The Ghosts of the Lyric
This narrative will shortly take a turn into a more mys-
terious vein, but before I got to that part, I wanted to
explain to you what kind of place the Lyric Theater was when
I was spending some evenings there chatting with my friends.
It was a nice old place, although it was disintegrating
slowly. Beth and Bud were nice too; they were big Grateful
Dead fans, frequent wearers of tie-dyed shirts, the sort of
people who I figured would always be fairly happy no matter
what they were doing. I was glad that I got to visit with
them, and happy also that I got to look around the theater
and find out about all the little cubbyholes and dark cor-
ners that I'd never known about back when I was a kid and
attending movies there.
Let me begin this part of the narrative by saying "I don't
believe in ghosts." It's almost obligatory, I think, to
begin a true-life account of a "haunting" with that dis-
claimer, so as to keep the reader from thinking that they're
in for another credulous narrative from an under-skeptical
lunatic.
I really don't believe in ghosts. I've never heard of any
"documented evidence" on the subject of ghosts that didn't
turn out to be misinterpreted or manufactured upon subse-
quent examination, and you'd think that if there really were
such things someone would have been able to call in scien-
tists and settle things for once and for all.
However... (long pause, deep sigh), I do have a few stories
to relate that strike me as being pretty close to saying "If
there aren't such things as ghosts, you tell me what it was
I heard that night." I present them here not as evidence of
the existence of ghosts but rather out of a desire to share
my puzzlement with the reader.
At first, it didn't occur to me to be spooked about all of
the old out-of-the-way places I came across while exploring
the Lyric. I was generally not the sort of person to get
myself all worked up over creaks and cold drafts, especially
when there were neat things to be looking at. I really did
like poking around, so I wasn't going to spoil things for
myself by imagining haunts.
All this changed in a hurry one night when Beth and I were
in the projection booth, high above the theater, watching
Bud do what he had to do to get the movie off the platters
and back into the cans to ship out the next day. It was a
quiet night, and we'd long since shooed everyone out and
locked the doors and gotten the stuff out for the morning's
classes. All that remained was to stow the movie away and
we'd split, perhaps to go over to the nearby Cellar beer-
joint for a pitcher of something cold and effervescent.
Then, during a lull in the conversation, there came a loud
shriek, basically what one would expect to hear if you had a
banshee close at hand, coming from just outside the booth
and over to the right hand side of the balcony. All three
of us reacted in the same way: we blinked and snapped our
heads around to stare in the direction the noise had come
from.
"What the hell was that?!" I asked, extremely startled by
the volume of the shriek coming from what I had every reason
to believe was a completely deserted balcony.
Beth and Bud looked at each other, then at me, and then Beth
shrugged, and said "We hear things like that all the time."
"What is it?" I wondered if it was some sort of equipment
in the walls rasping against something. Ever the skeptic, I
was looking for a reasonable expectation before jumping to
the conclusion that it was ghosts.
Bud spoke up, matter-of-factly. "We assume it's a ghost.
Like, there's no one in the theater and even if someone had
hidden in the restroom and then snuck up here to scare us
they'd have no way to get out without coming to us and
saying 'Can I get out?'" This was true, since even the
emergency exits were locked at night for reasons I wasn't
sure of.
Intrigued by the bland way Bud accepted the fact that a loud
shriek had come from a deserted balcony in an empty, locked
theater, I wondered what else had happened in the past to
accustom them to such things going on?
"We assume that there's a woman's ghost haunting the build-
ing. Every so often we hear her screaming from over in the
direction of the ticket booth." Beth pointed down through
the floor and to the right, in the approximate direction of
both the ticket booth on the floor below and also the direc-
tion the scream had seemed to come from. I'd thought of it
as more or less on the same floor as us, but then again it
hadn't lasted long enough to stop and triangulate its posi-
tion.
"No kidding," I said. "Does she ever say anything, or does
she just scream?" I was being facetious, not expecting the
answer I got.
"No, sometimes she says 'Let me out, let me out.'" I
thought Beth was kidding but from the look on her face, I
realized that she wasn't.
Now I began to get the impression that there really was more
going on here than I had originally thought. I was still
mostly expecting to go downstairs after Bud finished and
find something parked out on the street that could have made
the noise we'd heard, but Beth and Bud seemed to take it as
just another odd occurrence in a string of odd occurrences.
The fact that all three of us had heard it and registered
shock was another point in favor of it being something
requiring more explanation than I had handy.
Bud finished his work and he and I each carried one of the
heavy movie canisters down the back stairway to the street
door. On the way, we passed many little openings stuffed
full of old flyers and boxes of junk, and a door that was
nailed shut, and more boxes of junk, and an opening that led
off to a dead end, and so on down to the door. Where once
I'd just poked around and wondered what all that stuff was
kept lying around for, now I was eyeing the door and the
dead-end opening with a little suspicion and a little edgi-
ness. Bud, for all that he had much more experience with
the noises, could just as well have been walking down Main
Street at high noon as using the dark, cluttered back stair-
way of a haunted theater at eleven thirty in the evening.
He didn't seem nervous or worried so I just shrugged and
went on down and out to the street, where we met Beth coming
out of the main doors and locking them behind her.
"Do you really hear things like that often?" I asked?
They maintained that they did. For two people who had to
work three nights a week in a place where they regularly
heard eerie screams late at night, they were pretty com-
posed, I thought.
We were all fairly tired that particular night, so we didn't
stick around to discuss the "ghosts." Beth and Bud went on
home and I went off home too and mulled it over.
The next night, after class, I came back and sat in the
foyer with them and we talked about the ghosts. Beth said
that there were actually three or four places within the
theater that had ghosts or ghostlike phenomena associated
with them.
The first was the screaming woman, who usually just shrieked
wordlessly but sometimes screamed to be let out of wherever
it was she was trapped. For some reason, Beth and Bud
focused in on the origin of the sounds; they both went to
great lengths to explain how it had seemed to come from the
direction of the ticket booth. They usually heard it when
they were up in the balcony, but one time Beth had been in
the ticket booth itself, which sat just in from the street
in a large entranceway open to the weather, and had heard
the screaming coming from directly above her, from the other
side of the ceiling and perhaps coming from the rooms di-
rectly above.
I asked the obvious question: did they know of anyone who'd
been walled up alive in the theater? I asked this face-
tiously, of course, but their story seemed to indicate that
a spirit of a woman was trapped in some way in the offices
or ceiling above the ticket booth.
The answer? "Well, a workman WAS killed when the Lyric was
getting built..."
Not the answer I'd expected, but it did make me stop and
think. If ghosts did haunt the place they died, it might
mean that some of the "paranormal activity" in the theater
might be caused by the ghost of that workman.
And, in fact, there were some stories that made one think
again of this workman who'd been killed there. Beth said
that she sometimes heard a man stomping around on the stairs
leading up to the balcony and sometimes on the old back
steps leading from the balcony and projection booth to the
street.
A good place to hear and sometimes see odd things was the
balcony steps, they said. If you stood on the steps up to
the balcony, still in sight of the candy and drink station
in the lobby, you could often feel a chill brush past you
and now and then you'd be able to hear and see faint mutter-
ings and shadows from up above.
Bud had several stories concerning voices he'd heard in
places where he could definitely attest that no customers or
Lyric employees had been. He said that he had once or twice
been up in the balcony and heard a voice speaking quietly to
itself down in the main seating area, in the area of seats
nearest the screen. He'd looked out from the balcony and
seen absolutely no one anywhere out in the seats, and yet
here was this quiet voice speaking to itself. With the
Lyric locked up tight so no one could get out without a key,
it would have been tough for someone to hide there to fake
the "ghost" and then sneak out after Bud had left. And what
would have been the point? Beth and Bud were both so blase'
about the whole mess that anyone who stayed behind in the
Lyric night after night to try to startle them would quickly
have gone mad watching Beth and Bud yawn and lock the place
up and leave night after night.
A similar story involved a man and woman talking in the
balcony one night when Bud was tidying up downstairs. He
started up the balcony steps to take care of the movie and
heard them talking and waited a few minutes for them to
resolve their conversation and head on out. When they
didn't come down past him, he went on up and found the
balcony area empty. Since the back steps leading down to
the street required one to use a key to get out of the
building, the people couldn't have gotten out, so either
they had hidden themselves in one of the dead-end passages
off the back stairs or in the crawlspace above the projec-
tion booth, neither of which sounded likely, or they had
vanished into thin air.
The idea of anyone staying around after closing might have
made sense if the Lyric had ANYTHING worth stealing, but it
didn't. The projectors were these massive, far-too-heavy-
to-move pieces of equipment that used carbon arcs for light-
ing. Wandering into the projection booth was like wandering
into a mad scientist's workshop and if a thief had found him
or herself there, the first reaction would likely have been
to curse at the junk and head for the exit. Vandalism was
by far the greater problem for the Lyric management and
employees. People would tear most anything apart if it was
left out for anyone to get their hands on the next morning.
That nothing substantial ever turned up smashed or wrecked
by some "stay-laters" makes me think that some other expla-
nation was needed to explain the Lyric "ghosts."
None was forthcoming at the time, and since Beth and Bud had
no explanation either save that it might possibly have
something to do with her great-grandfather who had spent a
lot of time in the building during his life, we went on to
talk about other subjects.
A few nights later, Beth and Bud were in fairly perky moods
when I dropped by, and Bud asked me if I wanted to see what
was behind the screen.
"Sure," I said, not really expecting anything in particular
but willing to look.
Once we had closed up, Bud led the way to the right-hand
emergency exit passageway and opened a locked panel a few
feet above the floor in the left-hand wall. Beth hopped up,
and then I climbed up, and Bud followed. We were behind the
screen, in the vast emptiness of the old stage. It was
fairly dark but Bud turned on a few lights that revealed
just how large it all was. High above us, if you turned to
look, there were openings that led into rooms, or something,
but there was no way to get to them. I pointed and asked
and Beth told me that those were the old dressing rooms,
used when the theater had offered stage productions. The
stairs and catwalks that led to the dressing rooms were long
gone. Bud said he had been up and in them, finding nothing
all that exciting to look at, but I didn't think to ask how
he'd gotten up there because he was leading us over to
another locked panel, this one in the floor of the stage
near the middle of the screen.
Bud opened the panel, and looking down into the opening, I
saw just blackness. Bud said that if you jumped down you'd
find yourself in a tunnel leading along underneath the
stage.
"Hmm," I said, for some reason none too enthusiastic about
jumping down into a pitch-black tunnel leading into the
bowels of a darkened theater.
"A friend and I once got some flashlights and went down
there. It was spooky as hell." Bud placed a great deal of
emphasis on the phrase "spooky as hell." I could see why.
It was dark down there. "We crawled down the tunnel until
we got to this grate. It felt cold. Like there was some-
thing just beyond it waiting for someone to come through."
Anticlimactically, he finished, "We got the hell out of
there."
"Why don't you shut the hatch?" I suggested?
Beth grinned at me and Bud shut the hatch.
Once it was shut, Bud pointed out that the old orchestra pit
was still down under the theater. If you stood in the front
row of seats, there was a semicircular area of floor between
the seats and the screen where the old pit had been covered
over. Bud theorized that the tunnel beneath the stage might
well have led to the covered-over orchestra pit; the grate
might have been the entrance to the pit. We had just been
talking about the voices in the seats that Bud had heard one
night, and I think we all started to wonder if there might
have been any connection between the voices and what I
privately thought of as the "malevolent force" beyond that
grate. Perhaps someone was buried under the floor in the
old orchestra pit. Once our thoughts started down that
avenue we could keep coming up with new ways to scare our-
selves, so we got out of there and locked the stage access
panel back.
Before we left that night, Bud showed me the boiler room,
located beneath the stage and accessed through a panel at
the back of a little niche that seemed made for a garbage
can to sit in, there in the emergency exit corridor. That
was when I found out about Russell's popcorn. The drum was
three-quarters full and a whole stack of empty, soiled
popcorn tubs was sitting next to it. I wondered how an
aged man such as Russell would be able to get the drum of
popcorn out when the time came to take it off to feed to his
"pups." Perhaps he emptied it into smaller containers. One
might never know. One day the popcorn would be there and
the next night it would be gone.
It was a few evenings before we resumed our explorations of
the haunted areas of the Lyric. Back up in the balcony one
night, Bud mentioned that if I climbed up on top of the tank
of the old, disconnected commode that sat in a closet off
the projection booth, I could get up to a place above the
booth, looking out over the suspended ceiling of the theater
itself. Not to be a coward, I climbed up, getting quite
dirty from the accumulated soot and dust as I climbed up out
of the closet and into a dark area lined with cinderblocks
beneath the metal support beams. There was a whole stack of
old, warped records up there, and I took a few and hopped
back down into the booth to see if any of them had familiar
artists. None did. They were all the "Johnny Doe Band" or
"Jackie Sings," with faded color jackets and dates from the
1940's and 1950's. I assumed that they'd once been used to
provide music for the theater... but why would they have
been stowed up in the ceiling? Who knew.
I climbed back up and past the stack of records and looked
over a low wall of cinderblocks where the projection booth
wall continued on up past its ceiling, and looked out over
the top of the theater. In the dim vastness of the theater,
I could see metal struts and beams, all supporting the
weight of the ceiling and lighting, and far across the
theater, at the stage end, I could see a catwalk of some
sort. Once I'd noticed it I could see it running back
toward me, stopping part-way across. I assumed that it
might have been there for changing of lights or something.
For some reason, though, my imagination started to click,
wondering who or what might be out there on the catwalk.
Before I knew it I was half-imagining something coming along
the catwalk toward me, something headless and dark. I
ducked back down and into the projection booth, having
actually seen nothing but having managed to spook myself
considerably nevertheless.
Back down in the balcony after we left the projection booth,
I asked Bud what was on the other side of a door that one
could see in the balcony wall, half-blocked by chairs and
painted over. I'd asked this before but forgotten his
answer. He replied that it led to the offices, he thought,
although he didn't remember which office had a door that
didn't go anywhere. I'd never been up in the Lyric offices,
which looked out over the theater marquee, since there
wasn't any way to get from the Lyric proper into them. You
had to go out to the street, down past Carol Lee Donuts, and
back in another entrance that led to a stairway and up to
the offices. Bud said he'd take me up there sometime. It
was nothing all that exciting, he said, but I just wanted a
look around.
So, a couple of weeks later, I asked Bud if he'd show me
around up there, since he'd just gotten through telling Beth
that he'd come in early the next afternoon to set up a new
movie. He said "Sure, come on by and we'll go look." So,
I did. I found Bud up in the projection booth, about five-
thirty in the afternoon. He left what he was doing and we
went back out to the street and up to the offices. The
offices themselves were pretty humdrum, typical dusty old
offices with pictures and things from Beth's father's high
school days and even further back than that. Bud then
showed me the rest of the rooms, after having showed me each
of the offices. We went into a storeroom full of junk,
passing right by another door as we went. I stopped and
opened the door we'd passed by.
Dark. That was my first reaction. The hallway was none too
well lit and the room beyond the door was not lit at all.
More than that, it seemed to be full of a kind of inky
blackness. I kid you not when I say that I felt a kind of
awareness in the room. I was still standing there, staring
worriedly into that room with the hair on the back of my
neck standing up, when Bud came back, having noticed I was
not following behind him. "Joel, I would close that door."
I closed it.
I looked at Bud and said "Ack." He nodded and said "I know.
That was why I passed that door by."
I looked at him, then at the door.
"Wow," was all I could say.
We poked around a little more, but it really wasn't that
impressive a place; it was just a set of offices with old
movie schedules and projector parts and boxes of cups sit-
ting around. Except for the Door.
When we left and went back into the theater, I was thinking
furiously. For one thing, that room was just precisely
situated to be on the far side of the painted-shut door in
the balcony wall. For another, it was more or less right
above the ticket booth. For a third, it seemed alive, or
perhaps dead would be a better way of putting it. Well,
whatever it added up to, I left the theater that day certain
that I would not go into that room for any amount of money.
Not unless I had about six floodlights and a Bible and a
crucifix and about six gallons of holy water with me. I
don't know what works against ghosts but I was fairly sure
one was in there and that was good enough for me.
Part III: The Lyric Today
The Kelseys sold the Lyric to HCMF a few months later,
shortly after Beth's grandfather passed away (I think that
was it), and I happened to be driving by one night by just
as Beth and Bud and Mr. and Mrs. Kelsey were leaving the
theater for the last time. I didn't know that was it, but
Beth looked pretty upset, and with all four of them leaving
the theater on a weeknight around ten o'clock I felt
something had to be up. I parked and got out of my car and
walked down to where they were standing talking to each
other. Bud told me that they had just done their last
walk-through of the Lyric; the next day they'd give the keys
to the HCMF people and that would be that. They'd essen-
tially given the Lyric to HCMF in return for cancelling all
the accumulated debts. (I think.) None of them were
exactly happy about it, and there was nothing I could say
that would cheer things up.
With the sale of the Lyric, Beth and Bud suddenly had three
more nights a week to do things in, so from that standpoint
it was nice for them; they had not been getting paid for
their time so they didn't even lose money in the process.
HCMF tried to keep the Lyric open, using the old Lyric staff
who'd worked for Beth and Bud and the Kelseys, but even with
staff that knew the operation there was just no way you
could make money at it. Even without having to pay them-
selves rent, the amount that they had to make to pay off the
movie distribution companies each week before they could
make any profit was way more than they could take in each
week. Eventually the Lyric closed its doors for good and
wound up being used only when Virginia Tech needed it for
some reason. The Virginia Tech Union showed films there for
a while (even going so far as to sell the incredibly stale
candy that had been left over from when the Kelseys had
owned it) but when the student center on campus re-opened
that was it.
Since the Lyric occupies the center of a block, with apart-
ments above parts of it and stores all around it, no one can
just go in and demolish it and build something on the site.
So until someone comes up with the money to gut the insides
and put something else there, or comes up with the where-
withal to restore the theater and use it for theatrical
productions or something people would come to, the Lyric
will remain closed and shuttered, with only its ghosts for
company.
Copyright 1989 Joel Furr
---#STONEFREE
Brought to you by Stone Free BBS -- 606.885.1715
Fido: 1:2370/69
Sysop: Chef Groovy/FaTSacK