When the pig began singing my little girl got out of her chair and started dancing.
Those chairs were a familiar comfort to me. In fact, I once came out of my seat in excitement back in 1985 when Rocky Balboa was battling it out against the Russian in Rocky IV.
It had been too long since I’d enjoyed those chairs, but I immediately felt right at home.
We were watching the animated movie “Sing” at the Plaza Cinema in Yazoo City.
It was about a singing competition where the competitors were animals ranging from a mouse to an elephant. There was even a rock and roll porcupine who started losing quills when she got to shaking her head during the performance.
The kids seemed to know most of the songs because they got excited every time a new one began. My daughter has never been shy, and she got up and danced whenever she felt inspired.
That’s not exactly a movie I would have picked out, but my daughter Elsie had been begging to go, and nine-year-old James even seemed eager to tag along.
They were thrilled to see that several of their friends were also in attendance.
Yazoo City is one of the few small towns in Mississippi that still has a movie theater. In fact, it’s one of the few cities that has a theater at all. There isn’t a single theater still located within the city limits of Jackson.
When I lived in Cleveland as a student at Delta State University and later at my first newspaper job, they had a pretty good theater, but it went out of business. They opened a nice theater in Greenville while I was still living nearby, and it was celebrated by the community.
We are very fortunate to still have our theater in Yazoo City. It’s the same great place that I enjoyed as a child, and now my own children are enjoying it just as much as I did.
Our local theater’s prices are also very reasonable. We were able to get three tickets and some popcorn without breaking the bank. That’s a rare thing for my family these days.
I’m glad that I took the time to take my kids to see that movie. It was a great reminder of how much I have enjoyed our local theater over the years, and I’m going to make the commitment to go more often.
If you haven’t been to our local movie theater lately, or if you’ve never been at all, I encourage you to go catch a movie sometime.
We’re fortunate to have a good theater in our community, and it deserves our support. It’s rarely so much fun to support a local business.
