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π COMMUNITY
The Backpack Count Is In, and It Says Something About This Town
Back in August I told you Micah House's Back2School Jam was worth showing up for. Here is what showing up looked like. Organizers handed out 1,100 backpacks stuffed with supplies. Thirty kids rolled home on new bikes and scooters. Street Shaves gave 100 free haircuts, which sounds small until you remember what a fresh cut does for a nervous kid on day one. A.K. Smiley Library put hundreds of new books in kids' hands and signed up families for library cards on the spot.
The Police Officers Association grilled 500 hot dogs. There was a foam pit, balloon animals, and a fire engine the kids climbed through. Behind it were churches, nonprofits, the city, Redlands Community Hospital, the Chamber, Crafton Hills College, and a long list of neighbors who never asked for credit. Micah House runs this every year for families stretched thin by money, work schedules, or language, and their after-school program carries that work through the rest of the year. If you want to be part of next year's count, they are not hard to find.
Source: Community Forward Redlands
π ARTS & CULTURE
There Is a Room in Redlands Where the '80s Still Play Loud
Harkins Mountain Grove runs Tuesday Night Classics every Tuesday at 7 PM. Old movies, back where they belong. Not a streaming window on a laptop with the lights on and your phone face up next to you. A real screen, a real sound system, and a dark room full of strangers who laugh in all the same places you do. I am a movie guy. This is the best standing appointment in town.
Two dates are already circled on my calendar. September 15, The Departed. Scorsese, DiCaprio, and Nicholson chewing through every scene he is in, and two and a half hours of Boston tension that a big screen makes so much worse in the best possible way. It runs again Wednesday the 16th if Tuesday is tight. Then October 20 and 21, The Lost Boys, which is the correct way to open Halloween season in a town that takes October seriously.
Here is the part worth passing along. Most people under 40 have only ever met these movies on a phone. At home, The Lost Boys is a movie. In a theater with a crowd, it is an event. Harkins tends to load October with horror and the rest of the fall lineup posts closer to each date, so check the calendar before you make plans. Bring the kid who has never seen it big. That is the whole trick.
Source: Harkins Tuesday Night Classics (27481 San Bernardino Ave, Redlands)
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