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riding a bicycle.” But I had argued, doggedly, that it was a lot more complicated than riding a bicycle. Anyway, I am trapped in the wrong script. I say the line. Then I make a face to show my disapproval and, for an instant, I resemble not Mickey Rooney but Peter Lorre in
M
. My screen test had failed.
    In 1935 I had seen Max Reinhardt’s film,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Bewitched, I read the play, guessing at half the words; then, addicted to this strange new language, I managed to read most of Shakespeare before I was sixteen. (Yes,
Cymbeline
, too.) I am sure that my response was not unique. Certainly, other children must have gone to Shakespeare’s text if only in search of Mickey and that Athenian forest where, after sunset, Oberon and Titania ride, attended by all sorts of mythical creatures; and those mortals who stray amongst them and, hence, are subject to change. Metamorphosis, not entropy, is sovereign in these woods, and to this day I can still, in reverie, transport myself to A Wood Near Athens on that midsummer night before the Athenian Duke’s marriage to the Amazon Queen.
    Washington’s principal movie palaces were on the east side of Fourteenth Street. The Capitol was the grandest, with a stage show and an orchestra leader called Sam Jack Kaufman, whom I once saw in the drugstore next to the theater. He wore an orange polo coat that matched his orange hair. He bought a cigar. Between each movie showing, there was an elaborate stage show. I also remember Peter Lorre’s hair-raising and ear-deafening impersonation of himself in
M
. Then, there were the Living Statues. Well-known historic tableaux were enacted by actors and actresses in white leotards. Sex could often be determined only by wig. Even so, the effect was awesome in its marblelike stillness. Boys in puberty, or older, affected lust when they saw these figures, but those of us who were prepubescent sternly looked only to the beauty and verisimilitude of the compositions. Thus, in many a youthful bosom, a Ruskin—or even a Rose LaTouche—was awakened.
    The Metropolitan was my favorite of the small theaters. I think it was here that Warner Brothers pictures played. The atmosphere was raffish. And the gum beneath the seats was always fresh Dentyne. The Palace Theater was also congenial, while the Translux, devoted to newsreels and documentaries, was the only movie house to open in my time, and its supermodern art deco interior smelled, for some reason, of honey. At the time of the coronation of George VI, there was displayed in the lobby a miniature royal coach and horses. I wanted that coach more than I have ever wanted anything. But my father made an insufficient offer to the manager of the theater. Later, I acquired the coach through my stepfather, to add to a collection of three thousand soldiers kept in the attic at Merrywood. Here I enacted an endless series of dramas, all composed by me. If ever there was a trigger to the imagination, it was those lead soldiers. Today they would be proscribed because war is bad and women under-represented in their ranks. But I deployed my troops for other purposes than dull battle. I was my own Walter Scott. I was the Warner Brothers, too, and Paramount as I played auteur, so like God, we have been told by film critics.
    The most curious of the movie houses of my childhood was the Blue Hen at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where the family went occasionally in the summer. What a Blue Hen had to do with a movie house I puzzled over for half a century until a young Delawarean in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre told me that the Blue Hen was the state university mascot.
    At the Blue Hen I saw
Love Song of the Nile
with Ramon Navarro and Helen Broderick: a film that I can find no record of anywhere except in my memory. But I do know that Egypt was on my mind as early as 1932 when I saw
The Mummy
, with Boris Karloff. The effect of that film proved to be lifelong. Also, it must be recalled that in those days if you