After spending our morning in frigid wind on a Providence street corner protesting our country’s leadership, my friend and I were treating ourselves to a Saturday afternoon showing of Chloe Zhao’s film, Hamnet, at the Avon Cinema.
We parked my car on Brook Street, directly across from Brown’s physics and engineering complex. Dee and I chatted about how so many of the university’s newer buildings aren’t attractive but how Dee loves the silver infinity ribbon sculpture on the grass in front of the generic engineering building. We had no clue, of course, that in less than two hours a gunman would spray bullets at dozens of students inside that building, killing two and wounding nine.
We had an hour before the 3:45 p.m. movie so we walked a few blocks of Thayer Street looking for a coffee shop to get out of the cold. We quickly grasped that it was finals week at Brown. Nero Kitchen was packed wall to wall with students, all of them sitting in front of laptops. At Sydney Cafe, another block north, a student invited us to take two seats at her table where her friend was helping her review for an econ final. I stared at a student’s laptop at a window seat because her screen was filled with an enormous spreadsheet that I couldn’t begin to comprehend.
Throughout Hamnet, which is an intense and beautifully shot film, my phone vibrated with texts. Junk mail, I was sure. Maybe pitches for political donations. As the film credits rolled at about 5:45 p.m., a calm announcement came on the theater’s speakers. Police have informed us of an active shooter on the Brown campus and are advising everyone to remain in the theater.
About 60 of us were seated throughout the theater. I could see little lights flicker on as we all pulled out our phones to start looking up the news. A text from Dee’s partner, Sally, had been one of the vibrating messages I missed: Be aware — active shooter on Brown’s campus, no suspect yet. Get out of there!
I appreciated the calm demeanor of a man in the row ahead of us, a Brown faculty member who was getting messages directly from the university. He and I compared notes as I checked Threads and CNN:
As many as 20 people shot.
Two dead.
Helicopters airlifting students.
A second shooting on Governor Street, then a correction that it was an unrelated incident.
My fear grew. I felt like we were sitting ducks in a wide-open theater with nowhere to run for cover if the shooter blasted his way into the Avon.
Suddenly animated Christmas carol short films started playing on the big screen, with the audio turned up. “Have a holly jolly Christmas…” Two hours earlier the retro-styled animations had sort of charmed us as we waited for the movie. Now they were jarring, bizarre. Our faculty friend went to ask twice for the projectionist to cut them off.
Time dragged. At one point I paced in circles, down one aisle, across in front of the stage, up the other aisle. I told myself we were lucky. It was warm in the theater. We had seats. We had the company of kind strangers.
Eventually a couple left the theater. Without saying a word they walked down the aisle, through curtains beside the stage, up a few stairs, and out an alley door. Dee and I started talking about the possibilities. We knew we could be stuck in the theater for many more hours. Dee is fearless. She wanted to follow the couple’s example: we could slip out the side door to the back alley and walk to the bottom of College Hill, where Sally could pick us up.
Sally, watching the news from home, immediately shut that plan down. Soon the theater staff told us that we could leave as long as we didn’t need to head south down Thayer, because police had closed the street off at the Waterman intersection.
We knew my little car was at the epicenter of all the action; we might not get close to it for days. Dee called an Uber and at 7:45 p.m. a fellow picked us up a block north of the theater. Things felt oddly normal. I had pictured officers in riot gear patrolling the Thayer Street sidewalks, their guns pulled, all of which was likely happening a few blocks from us. But we just climbed in an SUV, our driver silent, and rode to Dee and Sally’s house.
On Sunday, the day after the shooting, the day’s mix of real and surreal swirled in my head Sunday. Hamnet dealt so powerfully with death and dying that at first the announcement of the shooting just felt like an extension of the movie. These things only happen on our screens, right?
It’s been 45 years since I’ve had to study for college finals and my kids are 15 years beyond college. But having witnessed so many students bent over their laptops on Saturday, my heart goes out to Brown’s students. I’m guessing they spent the morning after the shooting packing their bags and finding the fastest way to get home once they heard that all finals were canceled. I can only imagine their swirling emotions.
I also appreciate how tight our small community can be, how even strangers stuck in a movie theater can be there for each other. I learned via Facebook that a friend I’ve met this last year through a Pawtucket yoga class came and picked up her adult son from the Avon, probably right around when Dee hailed our Uber. The coincidence reinforced a post I saw on Threads the night of the shooting: “I don’t think people out of state understand the culture of Providence. This is the towniest city ever. It’s community. Everyone is intertwined.”
In 2024, Lisa A. Watts moved to Rhode Island for the fourth time in four decades. She worked in Newport for two years after college in the early eighties, in Providence for a year to help start Rhode Island Monthly in 1988, and more recently in Westerly during the first year of the pandemic. She lives in Barrington now, two houses from the East Bay Bike Path.
Want to comment? Click!