I originally wrote this essay back in 2008 as an assignment for a college English class. The task was to write a first person narrative from a personal experience similar to what you might hear in one of those fantastic ten-minute long journalistic pieces on NPR. I was inspired to revisit and publish this piece by the splendid series of short essays the experience of seeing a film at a movie theater at Salon.com, "Slide show: The movie experience I can’t forget". In particular, Kartina Richardson’s remembrance of watching Pickup on South Street with a crowd for the first time resonated deeply with me. I had a similar experience when I saw my beloved Out of the Past with a crowd for the first time when it played at The Starz Film Center in downtown Denver.

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Leading in to the Mad Men season four premier this Sunday, AMC has published a series of stunning portraits by photographer Frank Ockenfels 3. His images are dramatic works of art that capture, in the most iconic sense, some of the characters and themes from the show and its upcoming season.

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My kids love Chicken Run, the masterpiece of stop motion animation by Aardman, the studio responsible for the equally brilliant Wallace & Gromit series. But, being that Samantha and Kristen are six and four years old respectively, it’s hard to convey to them how such films are created. For weeks, the girls have prompted me with such questions as "How do they make the chickens move if they aren’t real?" and "Do they have batteries?" They’ve seen the documentaries and marveled at miniaturized sets, characters, and the dozens of interchangeable heads that allow each character to possess a myriad of facial expressions. Still, they don’t really understand exactly what the process behind stop motion is.

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