During my teenage years, I would sometimes help my father changing movie screens in old theatres. The old screens had to be unlaced from their frames and then the new screens had to be laced in their place. To reach the top of the screen frames required a scaffold and I would help my father carry the pieces from his van into the theatre and assemble them on the stage. Then he would climb up and work on the lacings while I pushed him across the stage from below.

The theatres were always empty, of course. From the stage I would look out over the rows and rows of empty seats stretching back up towards the lobby. Each one of them seemed to hold faded memories of boys on their first dates kissing their girlfriends; mothers sitting with kids holding their bags of popcorn; friends looking up at the flickering action taking place on the screen; lonely people sitting by themselves in corners.

The projectionist appeared from a door in the back of the theatre with a roll of film under his arm and made his way up to the projection booth. I wondered to myself how many movies he had brought up there: Fantasia, Bullet, The Outlaw Josie Wales, The Sound of Music, The Planet of the Apes, The Man with the Golden Gun. How many audiences had come and gone out into the night, leaving those rows of chairs behind. Like ghosts that could not speak of what they had seen or felt, they stared back at me.

I could imagine all those people sitting in those chairs, watching me on that stage. What could I do to impress them? Recite one of my poems? Sing a song? What would they think of that?

The answer was silence.

In the end, before any audience could witness the feat, the new screen had been installed and I had made my performance, my contribution to the stage, somewhere in an upstate or south Jersey town, on an unannounced date.