Last Show at The Luna
by: Bekah
It was Tuesday morning, but it wasn’t just another Tuesday morning. It was the first Tuesday morning since Jenna’s Aunt Helen died. It was the first Tuesday morning she had been given that she would open her aunt’s vintage clothing shop on her own. It was the first Tuesday that she heard a distant echo of applause. It was muffled, like a crowd clapping behind thick, vintage curtains.
She had closed the shop for a couple of weeks after her aunt died and had only been in it a couple of times before. She wasn’t exactly interested in vintage clothes. She wasn’t sure why Helen had left it to her, other than maybe there was no one else to leave it to. When she first stepped into the shop a couple of weeks ago, she was overwhelmed. Hats hung from every inch of the ceiling. Racks and racks of vintage clothes, zipped up in plastic garment bags hung so tightly together that you could barely see what you were looking at. But that wasn’t all.
She’d been hearing things. Not voices exactly, but sounds that belonged to another time. Aunt Helen would have called it “the building settling,” but Jenna knew better. Buildings didn’t settle with 1940s big band music or the rustle of taffeta gowns.
Jenna locked her car door and looked around the parking lot. It hadn’t always been a broken up cement lot with faded paint just barely visible enough to discern. The office building that sat on the parking lot used to be the Luna Theatre until it shut down in 1978. The Luna had held a special place in Steubenville history. Now, it was mostly forgotten by everyone in town, but sometimes, when the light hit the adjacent brick wall just right, Jenna thought she could almost see the ghost of the old marquee: “Now Showing: Casablanca.”
Jenna had inherited more than just vintage clothes from her Aunt Helen. Growing up, she’d inherited Aunt Helen’s stories about the Luna. She told her fantastical tales about first dates that turned into golden anniversaries, about the night Dean Martin visited during his early career, about couples who got engaged in the back row during “Gone with the Wind.”
“The Luna was the heart of the town,” Aunt Helen used to say. “When it stopped beating, something in Steubenville went quiet.”
The faint applause came again during Jenna’s lunch break. She had been sorting through some old boxes in the back, when she came across memorabilia that was unlike anything else in the shop. It was a box of Aunt Helen’s stories. Jenna had always assumed her stories were tall tales meant to make her feel more excited about the boring town she grew up in. But now, her perspective was changing.
Inside the box were dozens of ticket stubs, each one carefully dated and annotated in Helen’s neat handwriting. “First kiss—Jimmy Stewart double feature, April 15, 1943.” “Cried through ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’—Dec 24, 1946.” “Last show—‘Superman’ Dec 15, 1978.”
But at the bottom of the box was something else: an old brass key attached to a small card that read “Projectionist booth.”
Jenna looked out the window at the office building that now occupied the Luna’s space. On the third floor, in what would have been exactly the right spot, was a window that had always seemed oddly shaped to her. Too small for an office, too high for storage.
The applause grew louder.
By six o’clock, Jenna had convinced the building manager to let her investigate the noises she was hearing on the vacant floor and also recruited her neighbor Ben, who would begrudgingly go on any adventure Jenna invited him to.
“This is crazy,” Ben muttered as they climbed the narrow service stairs to the third floor. “Even if there was something left of the Luna, it would have been gutted years ago. Or at the very least, the building manager would know about it.”
But when they reached the oddly-shaped room behind the strange window, Jenna knew Aunt Helen’s key would fit. And it did.
It was like they were entering into a time capsule. The old projectionist booth sat exactly as it had been left in 1978. Film reels lined the walls. The massive projector pointed through a sealed opening toward where the screen once hung. And there, on the small desk where the projectionist once worked, was an old newspaper clipping:
“The Luna’s Final Show Canceled.” Below it was a quote from Harold Finn, the Head Projectionist from 1952-1978. “We anticipated a bittersweet end, but not like this. Our last show was supposed to be ‘Superman,’ but the projector broke during the first reel. We never got to finish it. Just remember, the heart of this place isn’t in the building. It’s in the stories we shared in the dark. ”
Jenna ran her fingers along the projector’s metal housing. Suddenly, she stopped. One of the film reels was still threaded and ready to run. A piece of tape on the canister read “Superman—Reel 2.”
“Ben,” Jenna whispered, “do you think this old projector still works?” Jenna was about to take Ben on another absurd adventure.
Word had spread quickly through Steubenville. “Bring blankets and lawn chairs. The Luna Theatre’s final show is tonight.”
As the sun set, more than two hundred people gathered in the narrow parking lot. Jenna and Ben had rigged the old projector to shine through the third-floor window onto a white sheet hung between two buildings. It wasn’t perfect, but when the opening credits of “Superman” began to roll something magical happened.
Children sat cross-legged on the asphalt. Teenagers shared popcorn from brown paper bags. Elderly couples held hands in folding chairs. And for ninety minutes, the heart of the Luna Theatre beat again.
When the credits finished, the applause was thunderous. Jenna looked up at the projectionist booth window and could swear she saw Harold Finn tipping his cap.
The next morning, Jenna opened her shop to find a line of customers. They weren’t there for vintage clothes. They wanted to know about the Luna, about Aunt Helen’s stories, about the history they’d witnessed the night before.
“Are you going to do this again?” asked Mrs. Patterson, who’d been on her first date at the Luna in 1965.
Jenna looked across the street at the parking lot, then up at the window where Harold Finn’s projector waited. “I think,” she said, “the Luna has a few more stories to tell.”
