1990 or so.
Laemmle’s Monica Fourplex, on Second Street in Santa Monica.
It’s a Thursday night. The sidewalk in front of the box office is empty and quiet. The last picture of the day is about to start. I work two jobs and practice karate in my off time. These slow weekday evenings in the box office are precious.
I hear a pair of footsteps coming up the sidewalk and the singer Sinead O’Connor walks into view. Her chin is angled up as she searches the showtimes, displayed in white plastic letters directly above my head. Finally she approaches. Her large grey-green eyes and heart-shaped face, accentuated by her shaved head, reminds me of Bambi.
By this time, Sinead had already won acclaim for her song Mandika which appeared on her first album, The Lion and the Cobra; and now the video Nothing Compares to U was playing everywhere. The video is hypnotic. Five minutes of just her face. (With a couple of dreary artistic scenes of a park in Paris spliced in.) The framing on her face was so tight that the whole head could not fit in. One moment she’s looking down and you can see her feathery widows peak. The next moment she shifts such that you can make out a mole, covered in makeup, on the left side of her chin. The black background and black turtleneck makes her face inescapable. About four minutes into the video you see a tear trickles down one cheek, and then the other. When asked about it later, Sinead admitted that she was thinking about her mother who was killed in a car accident five years earlier; but nobody knew this at the time. We all imagined something romantic.
It would be another two years before the infamous incident at Saturday Night Live where Sinead ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II in protest of widespread child abuse within the Catholic Church, including the physical, sexual and emotional abuse she herself had suffered as a child. A decade or two later, the truth about the Catholic church would be exposed in a series of law suits, but Sinead’s career would never recover. But for now, Sinead was still a petite singer with a fiery Irish demeanor and a crackling voice that could move you to tears.
Sinead approached the box office and asked about a movie, a title that she couldn’t find in the sign above my head. I told her that we were no longer showing it, that the previous night was the last night for that run.
A few yards behind her, a man in an expensive suit, her companion for the evening, was standing arms akimbo. When he overheard me explain that the movie was no longer playing there he started to throw what could only be described as a temper tantrum. Groaning. Throwing his hands up in the air. Spinning around. Meanwhile Sinead’s eyes had resumed looking at the plastic letters. She pointed one hand at the man in the suit, who by that time was already walking away, and her other hand at the sign. As she backed away from the box office she called out, “But … they’re showing The Field?” (The Field was a movie about an Irish farmer trying to prevent the sale of his farmland at auction, a field that the family had rented and cultivated for generations.) But the man in the suit was already gone. And Sinead reluctantly followed, her eyes still fixed on the sign.
“Well that sucked,” I said to no one in particular.
The next evening, Sinead showed up with a different guy, one who wasn’t wearing a suit, to see The Field.