There is something ineffably sad about old abandoned movie theatres.

[caption id="attachment_367" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="The last picture show?"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/DSC_0313.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-367" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/DSC_0313-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" /></a>[/caption]

Larry McMurtry captured it so well in his wonderful novel, <a title="The Last Picture Show" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067328/" target="_self">"The Last Picture Show,"</a> made into an excellent film by Peter Bogdanovich in 1971. Shooting in little Archer City, Texas, the director used the closed "picture show" as a metaphor for a dying small town and indeed, a dying time.

Saturday afternoon I was shooting some photos of the partly dead, partly dying old downtown in Hondo, Texas, when I saw the Rave Theater. At first glance it looked as if the last film through the projector was "Jaws" or "Star Wars," and it made me think.

I wondered how many generations of South Texas kids had visited the Rave, and how many could look back now on memorable nights in their lives, and I thought about some of the memorable nights in my own life spent in other theaters in other cities.

My first date with the lovely Cheryl Newman was a movie and so was my last one. I remember standing outside a Washington, D.C., theater in the freezing cold with Shelley Marcus as we waited to see "M*A*S*H."

I remember my first date with my first wife -- a midnight show of "American Graffiti" in September 1973. I believe it was the fifth or sixth time I had seen the film, one of my favorites. I remember our last "date" too, an evening out six years later to see Burt Reynolds and Jill Clayburgh in "Starting Over" while our marriage was crumbling around us.

I remember all sorts of movies with all sorts of women in the 12 years between my two marriages, and I remember taking my wonderful Nicole to see "Gas Food Lodging" on a night she was so happy she skipped when she crossed Wilshire Boulevard.

Movies matter. During the early days of our marriage, when Nicole and I were still working to get to know each other, she told me she hadn't been looking to get married, that she only wanted someone to go to the movies with. I could certainly understand that. Going to the movies ought to be a communal experience.

<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/last.jpg"><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-368" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/last.jpg" alt="" width="96" height="140" /></a>I thought about all these things as I looked at the Rave, and then I realized something. As run-down and battered as the building looked, the name of the movie on the marquee wasn't something from a generation ago.

It was "Iron Man 2," and even though there was only one show a night at 7 p.m. six nights week (closed on Tuesdays), the Rave was obviously hanging in there.

I had to smile.

There was something very right about that.