I Gave It Away

The best job in the world--that's how I would describe the work I was lucky enough to get to do. In 1976 I opened my own independent movie house. By the time Vinegar Hill Theatre closed in 2011, we had shown over 2000 movies--everything from Swing Time to There Will Be Blood. In the meantime I feasted on the Boyfriend Bonanza of the late 60's and 70's. But I was also looking for true love and eventually found it in my second marriage. This is the story about the coming of age of the Sixties Generation and of the amazing opportunities that opened up in the life of one woman when she discovered that strongly spent is synonymous with kept.

When I arrived in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1966, it was snowing a blizzard. None of the taxis were running, and I walked the mile to housing in a light coat and Capezio flats. Adult unpreparedness trailed me during these graduate school years, as my attempts to secure a degree in history--then English--then drama--did not work out. Nothing took. I did find a husband and became the mother of two children by the age of twenty five. Meanwhile I modeled for Art school classes, hostess and managed the Gaslight Restaurant, and waited for my life to begin. Then one day my husband Chief came home and said, "Honey, I've found a building." It was an aging motorcycle showroom located on the edge of Charlottesville's old downtown. We decided to buy it and to transform it into our dream business--an independent movie theatre. We named it after the nearby African American neighborhood that had recently been urban renewed--Vinegar Hill. VHT, as it came to be known, opened on Valentine's Day of 1976. For the next thirty years it would be a center of Charlottesville's downtown life and the center of my life too. I learned how to operate a film projector, how to make the town's best popcorn, how to clean a lobby in ten minutes, the elements of crowd control. My marriage failed, and I learned what it was like to be a woman alone in business. Love and Work--that's what Freud says life is all about. While working very hard to program and manage the theatre I looked just as hard for someone to love, and, as my story reveals, I eventually found him.

I am a business woman, and the only woman I know to have built and operated her own independent movie theatre. I come from Italian American settlements located south of Boston and moved to Charlottesville, Virginia in 1966 when I was twenty-two. There I lived out the story told in my memoir. It's about building houses, a theatre, and two restaurants--I wanted to make real Italian food as well as show Fellini and Bertolucci--and about finding, losing and finding again. But this is not a triumphant tell-all about "leaning in." "Ann Porotti's intimate I Gave It Away is as unforgettable and erotically charged as many of the movies that shaped her life and her career as the owner of an independent movie house. This a singularly brave and uncompromised sequence of recollections, from an Italian-American coming-of-age, through turbulent romances, to unforeseen exhaustions and rewards of staying the course as a savvy business woman. Porotti's writing makes it all matter. I Gave It Away is a celebration of just how much a person can actually do and feel in a life. Plus, it's full of movies!" Howard Norman, author of Next Life Might Be Kinder.