If I won the lottery, I’d buy the Mayflower Theater.
The Mayflower is nothing but a burned out shell of a building now. Nobody is doing anything with it. Everybody realizes, I think, it’s too beautiful of a building to tear down, but there’s no profit in restoring it either.
Just before it burned out a couple of years ago, two young women were planning to remodel it and turn it into a big band-swing lounge. A place to lindy hop, drink martinis and pretend you were Martin or Sinatra at the Sands for an evening.
But then some homeless dreck got uncareful with some matches or a cigarette and the Mayflower became what it is today. Empty and forlorn.
But if I bought it, I wouldn’t make it a club or a theater or a dinner house. I’d make it my home.
It would be a home shaped like a theater, with a big screen for entertainment, a foyer for greeting guests (free soda and popcorn for all), and a master bedroom for me and Billie next to the projector room. I’d fill that shell back with life that paid tribute to its former luster.
I want to live in the Mayflower Theater.