By some strange confluence of historical currents, there seems to be a number of noteworthy anniversaries happening within days of each other this week. The most significant, of course, is the fall of the Berlin Wall on this very night 20 years ago, when ordinary Germans took matters into their own hands — literally, considering they went after the Wall with hammers, crowbars, and even their fingers — and put an end to one of the most powerful symbols of Cold War tension and communist repression, while border guards and secret police stood by and let it happen without firing a shot.

I have to confess that I wasn’t very aware at the time of what was going on. I regret it now; you want to be able to tell your kids and other younger people what it was like when the Big Things happened, the whole “I remember where I was when…” routine. But with this particular event, I simply can’t do it. I vaguely recall seeing the news footage of joyous Berliners dancing atop the graffiti’d barriers, and that iconic clip of the first big slab of the Wall toppling over. But in the autumn of ’89, I was so thoroughly preoccupied with my own personal problems — there was this girl, you see — that some big street party happening on the other side of the world simply couldn’t compete for my attention.

Looking back now, and having since made the acquaintance of some people who were actually in Berlin that night, I have a different perspective. The world really did change 20 years ago this month, and it did so at a startling rate of speed. I don’t think kids today can understand what it was like when I was growing up. Sure, we’re afraid these days of terrorists and random violence like the mass shootings that seem to happen every couple of years, but these things are really not the same as the existential dread of the entire globe being incinerated in a conflict lasting all of 20 minutes. Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, there were certain unalterable truths that everyone just knew: there was this big faceless enemy on the other side of the world that wanted to either kill us all or utterly dominate us; Ronnie Ray-Gun’s itchy finger was on The Button; and high-school kids were going to have to take to the hills to survive after the Russians invaded Idaho. The Terminator and The Road Warrior weren’t just great action flicks; they had an all-too-plausible subtext to them, the grim certainty that our civilization was going to end in horrific fire… and soon. And the Berlin Wall served as a kind of nexus for all those fears. That was somehow the center of it, the match that would ignite the conflagration. Granted, about all I knew about the Wall came from the movies Night Crossing and Gotcha!, and East Berlin was no more real in my imagination than Mordor, simply a place of gray shadows and misery. But it was part of a much larger psychological tapestry that seemed to underlie damn near every aspect of American life then, if you simply thought about it.

And then, just like that, it was all over. The world became, seemingly overnight, a very different, much less frightening place. It felt like we all exhaled and took a collective step back from a precipice. And despite what the more nervous types are thinking these days about the resurgence of Russian power, the attempts of Iran to acquire nukes, and the looming juggernaut that is China, I don’t think we’ll ever again feel like we’re standing on that razor’s edge of thermonuclear destruction. At least, I hope we won’t.

Moving on, tomorrow, November 10, will be the 40th anniversary of the debut of something that contributed at least as much to my psyche as the specter of global thermonuclear war, but was a heck of a lot more positive:

Sesame Street premiered only two months after my birth, so I do not remember a time BM — Before Muppets. I was one of the very first generation whose early education came in part from a TV program, and I dearly loved that program. I had (you all know me, I still have) a bunch of Sesame records and the unbelievably awesome Fisher-Price Sesame Street playset, and truth be told, I was still watching the show years after I should’ve outgrown it. Hey, it remained funny even after I got older, and the Muppets were like old friends. Even now, a glimpse of Kermit the Frog in his reporter’s hat and trenchcoat, or of Bert clenching his face and about to blow his stack, are all it takes to put a smile on my face, no matter how lousy the day has been. While I have concerns about how much time today’s kids spend in front of a video screen, I don’t have any regrets about the time I spent down on Sesame Street.

The show was actually pretty weird, now that I think about it, with a lot of psychedelic animation and funky little filmed segments, and of course Jim Henson’s slyly subversive sense of humor was all over the place. Not to mention his hippie philosophies about diversity and cooperation. My mother used to blame college for making me into a liberal, but I’m pretty certain you can actually lay that at the feet of Henson and Gene Roddenberry. She herself loves to tell about an occasion when I was about four and became utterly incensed when someone mentioned “the black man” — Gordon — on Sesame Street. I didn’t think of him as a black man, you see; he was simply Gordon. I can’t think of any more important lesson taught by that silly little puppet show.

I vividly recall the day Jim Henson died, how the campus of the University of Utah seemed to be populated by sad-eyed zombies all mourning a man whose creations had made such a tremendous impact on our generation. I don’t remember the Berlin Wall coming down, but I remember the death of the man who created the Muppets. Go figure.
One final anniversary to comment upon, and one that will probably be of interest only to Salt Lake natives: a few days ago, November 5, marked 10 years since the opening of Larry H. Miller’s first Megaplex Theater at Jordan Commons, the site of the old Jordan High School. I’ll be honest, I didn’t think it would endure. At the time, there were several national movie-theater chains operating in the Salt Lake Valley, and JC had a big problem in the beginning because Miller — a devout Mormon — didn’t want to show R-rated movies if he could avoid it, which severely limited his booking options. I’ve still got a day-one schedule for the place somewhere in my files, and as I recall, it was all documentaries and small pictures, “family friendly” stuff, with only one or two genuine Hollywood releases. I just didn’t see how the place was going to make it with such a narrow scope of offerings.

As petty as it sounds, I didn’t want JC to succeed. Larry Miller had long bugged me, what with his name plastered all up and down State Street (he owned virtually every car lot in the valley, or so it seemed) and his frequent, weepy appearances on the news anytime his basketball team did anything (the man cried at the drop of a hat, which for some reason really, really rubs me the wrong way; I intensely disliked Elizabeth Smart’s dad Ed for the same reason). Also, I was pretty unhappy about the destruction of yet another historic landmark, Jordan High, for the sake of a movie theater, a restaurant complex, and an office tower, i.e., for the sake of one man’s investment portfolio. Miller made a big deal about the first Megaplex echoing the facade of the old school and including some historic elements in its internal decor, but that was cold comfort to a true preservationist.

Still, even I had to admit that the food court area, which was designed to look something like an old-tymey Salt Lake street, was kind of cool, and I liked how the different corridors leading to the auditoriums were capped with replicas of famous Salt Lake theater marquees. The real Centre, Gem, Utah, and Uptown theaters are long gone, but at least they have these memorials.

A decade on, and the Megaplex chain now includes five locations scattered across the Wasatch Front; the other chains in the area have contracted and consolidated, and it appears to my eye that Miller’s gamble is doing pretty well. Jordan Commons, the flagship location, has set national box-office records for the openings of several big movies (I suspect it’s about to do so again when the next Twilight flick debuts) and it’s always well-trafficked. The Girlfriend and I are pretty regular patrons of JC and its west-side counterpart at the District (God, I hate the generic place names that developers bestow on everything — the District, the Gateway — no sense of history or place to any of them), but I have to admit that I remain ambivalent about supporting them. The chain long ago gave in to the inevitable and started offering a more diverse slate of movies, but there have been several very public controversies over Miller’s refusal to book certain titles that offended his personal sensibilities (i.e., films dealing with gay people and/or explicit sex) even while turning a blind eye to truly offensive stuff like the brain-dead Jackass flicks and, more recently, all the squicky torture-porn garbage like Hostel and Saw. That’s hypocritical, in my view, and it also show some seriously misplaced priorities: sadistic gore and stupidity is A-OK, but sex and love is not?

And just recently, the Megaplexes have begun to annoy Anne and myself by opting not to run newspaper ads anymore, so you have to go online or drive past the theater to find out what time anything is playing. News flash, Miller Group people: that’s not always convenient to do. Not everyone is packing an iPhone of Web-enabled device. There was one day when The Girlfriend was sufficiently put out by the situation that we took our business to a non-Miller theater.
Still, it is an achievement, starting a theater chain from scratch and actually making it work, so congratulations and acknowledgment is in order…

[One administrative note: my thanks to Samurai Frog for that Sesame Street cast photo.]