Some of you know I grew up in a movie house. The Rex in Muskogee, Oklahoma, Saturday matinees, a quarter for popcorn that tasted like salted cardboard and I'd trade a week of my life to have it back. So when I read The Collegian's piece on the Byrd Theatre, I confess I took it personally. Richmond's beloved old movie palace has gotten itself tangled in the modern sport of ruining people, and now the boycott crowd is doing to the Byrd what time and trouble never managed.

The Byrd is the kind of theater they don't build anymore because the people who'd know how are all dead. It's the sort of place where you can see a classic the way it was meant to be seen, on a big screen with strangers around you, in a room built for the love of it. Any town would be lucky to have one, and Richmond has known that for generations.

And now, per The Collegian's reporting, attendance has thinned because somebody decided the theater needed to be punished. Somebody said the wrong thing, or hosted the wrong screening, or failed to say the right thing loudly enough, and the machinery kicked in. The machinery always kicks in. It starts with screenshots, moves to statements, and ends with people who claim to love the place proudly announcing they'll never set foot in it again. A strange way of loving something, but nobody ever accused the mob of being consistent.

I've watched this play enough times to know the staging by heart. The theater becomes a proxy. Nobody boycotting the Byrd is actually angry at an old building. They're performing for an audience of each other, and the Byrd is just the venue that happened to be standing there when the tour came through. Small venues with volunteer ushers and tight budgets make wonderful targets because they can't fight back the way a studio can. They just bleed quietly and eventually the marquee goes dark, and the boycotters move on to the next cathedral to torch, feeling very good about themselves the entire time.

What galls me, and I say this as a woman who has spent forty years defending the right of audiences to hate a movie loudly, is the arithmetic of it. Criticism is fine. Boycott what you like; it's a free country and your wallet is your vote. But there's a difference between declining to buy a ticket and organizing to make sure nobody else can. The first is a consumer choice. The second is a heckler's veto with a web page. When the target is a multiplex owned by a conglomerate, fine, they'll survive. When it's a cherished local theater that runs on passion and donations, you're not punching up. You're kicking a puppy in a tuxedo.

And the ones hurt worst are the people the boycotters claim to speak for. Neighborhood folks who love a cheap night out. Kids discovering old pictures on a big screen, the kind of experience that converts a child into a film lover for life, and believe me, we need all the converts we can get in a world where the average new release costs as much as a car payment and respects you about as much as one.

Support your old theaters, Richmond. Buy the popcorn even if it's stale. The Rex came down in my hometown years ago, torn down for a parking lot, and I still drive past the spot sometimes in my memory and grieve it. Don't let a building that has outlasted a century of bad studio product get finished off by a hashtag. The movies deserve better. So do you.