Bright Lights, Little City - Georgetown, TX - News Article Locations on Waymarking.com

It's Friday night, and the audience is trickling in, mostly families with young daughters eager to see tonight's feature, Grease, to which they will sing along every word unerringly (their mothers will, too). The girl working the ticket booth, which is small and opens onto the street, is much too young to know firsthand the historical value of the seat she holds; she's used to the big, impersonal ticket windows at multiplexes where employees are lined up like bank tellers. Inside, another young girl works the concession stand with her mom, volunteers for Serateens, a community youth group. Last week, it was residents of Sun City, the nearby retirement community, who manned the lobby and could still remember what this felt like 50 years ago.

There's a slight delay with the popcorn -- it's still popping -- but that means it's fresh and comes in an old-timey, red-and-white striped cardboard box ... which shouldn't matter, but does nonetheless. Inside the theatre, two young girls have claimed front row center, in order to be as close to Danny and Sandy and as far from Mom and Dad as possible. There are 306 seats here, and, as I've been told repeatedly, there is not a bad seat in the house. The lights dim about 15 minutes late, but nobody seems to mind; the place thrives on a sense of unhurriedness. Well, the two preteens in the front row do look a little antsy, anxious to get on with the show. What they don't realize is that the show is already on: From the moment that marquee, neon and spangly, comes into sight, the show has begun.

Welcome to the Palace Theatre.

Georgetown might seem like a long way to drive to see a second-run movie still playing at the dollar theatre or readily available on video. But a good deal of the appeal to the Palace isn't so much the movies -- although they are thoughtfully chosen and admirably family-oriented -- but rather the moviegoing experience, something that is somewhat lost on generations reared by the strip-mall freneticism of multiplexes. It's maybe silly to fix a personality on a place, but something happens when you hook a left onto Austin Avenue and drive into Georgetown's historic district. Everything slows down -- just a little bit -- and then there's that marquee, neon and spangly, lighting up Downtown. It sends a little thrill down the spine every time. Or maybe it's the popcorn vendor, a 1940s-era replica, or the restored ticket booth where, Greg Free laughs, you can imagine "a Mabel or Madge or Mavis would sell the tickets." Board president Debbie Charbonneau knows they still have a long way to go for the nonprofit to settle in, but she remembers the first time she felt like the Palace had truly arrived.