For my family, there are certain kinds of memories that don’t come from vacations or big milestones. They come from ordinary nights that somehow stayed with us anyway—watching movies we grew up on, sharing snacks at home or sitting in a dark theater, and spending time together as the stories on the screen carried us through so many different seasons of life.

Those moments for my friends and family were never planned, and they were never meant to be anything special at the time, but somehow they became the ones we remember the most, the ones that stayed long after everything else changed.

For my family movies have a way of doing that. Some of them don’t just play on a screen for a couple of hours—they settle into your life and stay there. The Wizard of Oz is one of those films, the kind that pulls you into a completely different world and somehow still manages to feel like home by the end of it.

There’s something about the shift from black and white to color that still feels like stepping out of one version of your life and into another, and no matter how many times you’ve seen it, it still carries that same sense of wonder. Then there’s Grease, is one of my favorite movie which feels like summer nights and growing up all at once, full of music that seems to belong to a time when everything felt a little louder and a little more uncertain but also more alive.

Annie carries a different kind of feeling entirely, something softer but stronger underneath it, where hope becomes the center of the story and “Tomorrow” ends up being more than just a song—it becomes something people hold onto when life doesn’t go the way they planned.

Mary Poppins brings in imagination in a way that makes everyday life feel lighter, where even ordinary moments can turn into something magical if you look at them the right way. Back to the Future moves fast and bold, playing with time and consequences in a way that makes you think about how even the smallest decision can ripple forward into everything that comes after it.

And The Sound of Music carries that quiet strength about family and resilience, the kind of story where music becomes a thread that holds everything together even when life around it is changing. It’s also a movie I’ve never sat down and watched all the way through. Have you?

And then there were drive-in movies, which felt like their own kind of world completely. Families would pull in as the sun went down and park under the open sky, and for a while everything slowed down in a way that doesn’t really happen anymore.

I remember my dad telling me how kids would hide in the truck so they could get in for free. As adults our kids would end up half asleep in the backseat before the movie even really started, blankets would get pulled up too high, popcorn would be passed around without anyone thinking much about it, and someone was always trying to get the radio station to come in clearly enough to hear the dialogue.

Nothing about it was perfect, but that was part of what made it feel real, because you weren’t there for perfection—you were there just to be together, sitting in the same space, sharing the same screen while the night settled around you. Spending time as a family.

Live theater carries a different kind of memory, because nothing about it can be paused or rewound or saved for later. It happens once, in real time, and then it becomes something you carry with you. Productions like Hairspray fill a room with energy that makes it impossible to sit still inside your own thoughts, while Matilda the Musical has a quieter kind of power, the kind that speaks to anyone who has ever felt overlooked but still had more strength inside them than anyone realized.

Even places like Casa Mañana Theatre, become part of that memory-making, because sitting in a room where a story is unfolding in front of you creates something you can’t replicate anywhere else, no matter how many screens you have at home.

And maybe that’s why these movies and live shows still matter the way they do, because they slow everything down just long enough for families to actually be in the same moment without distraction, reacting together, laughing together, remembering together.

They remind us that stories aren’t just about what’s on the screen or the stage, but about who you’re sitting with while it’s happening, and those are the kinds of memories that don’t fade no matter how much time passes. Come and join me for movie night tonight.

Thank you,

Glenda, Charlie and David Cates