The 1978 film “La Cage aux Folles” at the Fine Arts Cinema in Palo Alto, California, in the early 1980s

For several years in the early 1980s, the Fine Arts Cinema on California Avenue in Palo Alto, California, ran Édouard Molinaro's 1978 movie "La Cage aux Folles", starring Ugo Tognazzi and Michel Serrault. I moved to Palo Alto in September 1980 for my last two years of high high school, and I'm pretty sure I saw the movie at that cinema before starting at Stanford in September 1982. Today, when I read a student's text about having seen the musical in high school a few years ago, I realized the film was probably my first experience of a work that challenged the homophobia of the 1970s culture I grew up in. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 1 May 2024)