The Breaking of Tarzan

Driving past an open spot on the Westsingel in Amersfoort in the Netherlands I saw this open spot again. One of the buildings has been removed like it was a rotten tooth. Plans were made to build a discotheque over there, but these have been delayed because there were old remains discovered. They have to be taken care of, carefully of course.

Once there was a film theatre on this spot, the last name it had was Corso. I always thought this was a peculiar name for a theatre. It reminded me of parades with cars decorated with flowers like we have them in the west of the Netherlands. The old name was better: City. It almost could give it an international image. The amount of visitors were a bit the same as far as I know. Not much really. Only some Saturday nights when there was nothing on television they would attract a crowd.

As a student I worked over there for six months instead of the three weeks that were initially planned for me. I was going to do this during the summer holidays but I was asked to stay and was very happy to do so. The money I made was not bad at all for a student, considering what you had to do for it.

There were three kinds of shifts: the selling of tickets from the ticket booth was one. The money you made on this spot was not much. You could even make it less by not paying enough attention to people who tried to rip you off. It happened to me once: instead of making money, I had to pay something like twenty five guilders to the management. This was a lot of money in the 70’s so it only happened to me once. Sometimes you got a tip, but the tips all went to the bouncer whose normal salary was even lower. He was an overweight man with a suit that reminded me of a ringmaster in a circus.

The second shift was being an usher/seller in the restaurant. Restaurant was an over-estimation, it was just a sort of canteen. The usher would walk through the aisles in the theatre with a tray full of all kinds of sweets. You had to put the products in carefully, so there would be a lot and in a way that you could reach everything easily. This had risks: there often were big guys who thought it was funny to lift you from the floor and shake you and the tray thus making a mess of it. Moaning about it was impossible because these men were the biggest buyers and tippers and their muscles were quite impressive. So you would laugh along a bit and walk on.