2. Pokerface Peters and the Bucket of Blood
My memory of an elderly loved one giving me a memory of a troubling visit.
My mother's family fell on hard times when she was young. Though she had early happy memories of her grandparent's farm in southwestern Ontario, and of playing in a home above a general store run by her father in Chatham, that was all a memory by the time she was fourteen. Her family was living in Kingston, Ontario, she had five younger siblings, and her father had no work and, as I understood her when she told me all of this, late in life, he had nothing left to give, just then. My mother left school at the age of fourteen under a cloud of fear and shyness, and poverty, and got a job as a waitress at the Superior Restaurant on Princes Street. She stayed there until she was 22 years old and married my father, for much of that time the primary breadwinner for the family.
My mother was also not a storyteller--unlike my father, who was born to tell a tale. She was a reader, and a writer, and a worshipper in her faith. But narrative was not on the face of it a part of her life. And yet, every now and then, she would tell me something, usually very late at night or very early in the morning, times we shared awake and alone, in passing and in a hushed voice--just a few lines, an image from the artist in her, a lesson. A memory. One of these was about the Bucket of Blood
She told me that, while she was working at the restaurant, she would occasionally take a break--her lunch, I expect--and go across the street to someplace called 'The Bucket of Blood.' It was, I believe, an independent entertainment venue, a small and temporary place, where she could watch short films and serials, on her own or with her co-workers.
She said she used to go to this place, and there she remembered watching the serial (now so famous in cinematic history), 'The Perils of Pauline.' That was the full memory--as I say, she was not a strong storyteller. But it was a memory of a performance that affected her deeply, and that she remembered for all of her long, full life. I have tried to elaborate on it for her--
Here was a teenager who had been discouraged from attending high school, had been (effectively) put to work to feed her family, and so was under a great deal of pressure.
An individual who was, I believe, excessively shy working in public--her name was Pearl, but her nickname among the clientele, I happen to know, was 'Pokerface Peters.' She was raised in an Evangelical faith that frowned on any kind of public entertainment, and performance in all its forms. And yet she slipped out of work to attend 'the movies.'
Going into that venue was 'wrong' in two ways. It was against her own religious upbringing. And it cost money that she was supposed to take home to help feed her family. The idea that she would spend her money in that way is so against the woman I knew, even so many decades later, that I am astonished. What caused her to do this?
And the venue, too, rings alarm bells.... I can find no record of a venue called 'The Bucket of Blood' in the early 1930s in that location, or anywhere in Kingston. But this doesn't mean the memory is false. I believe this says more about the legitimacy of the venue. Films could be shown anywhere and at any time for a small fee, opening and closing and moving whenever necessary, without licensing, investment, or much in the way of equipment.
Reinforcing this idea is the nature of the entertainment--silent film serials made many years before, still shown as the main theatres were showing full-length features, and turning toward sound pictures. So my mother was slipping across the street from her work, to a shady, likely run-down and very temporary store-front entertainment, opened for a working class audience just like her, escaping for a short while from their work and lives.
And the entertainment she remembers--the only entertainments, and for all I know the only one she saw--was about a young woman in endless distress at the hands of a ruthless villain, a woman who is always about to die as each chapter in the serial ends--tied to a railway track, hanging from a cliff--and then, at the beginning of the next chapter, escapes disaster, often miraculously, only to rush headlong toward the next.
These kinds of entertainments were later mocked ruthlessly--and in the case of Dudley
DoRight, cartoon and film, hilariously. But in all honesty, as I think back on my mother's circumstances just at that moment in her life, and at her age, it all makes sense to me that she would attend, and be so affected that she would remember, such stories. It was both an escape from her own circumstances, and an exaggerated reiteration of her circumstances.
I couldn't say how this individual could ever spend family funds to go to an entertainment immoral to her family. I can say that it must have been a truly powerful need, because she was not an easy woman to move from her beliefs, or her loyalties.
