Outside of memory, I hadn’t heard my mother’s voice for nearly 40 years.
In a case of old cassettes, buried among the mix tapes that I once so painstakingly crafted, was the plastic square with a Radio Shack label. In my neat teenage cursive scrawl, I’d written Academy Awards 1972.
I slid the cassette into my vintage Panasonic player. The voices of the dead echo from the past.
Mom is in the leather chair. Dad on the gold and green plaid couch. Who else is in the room? It’s the Oscars, after all. A ritual. An event.
There is no place beyond this; no parallel timeline unfolding, competing for attention. We’re there, in the only present, preserved, on this cheap jewel of plastic.
There’s hiss and crackle, and the jolting intrusion of commercials — See the USA in your Chevrolet!— but what fills the room with silence is the Academy orchestra, accompanying the cavalcade of silent movie clips in tribute to Charlie Chaplin who at 83 had returned from exile to accept an honorary Oscar to a 12- minute standing ovation.
The ceremony is formal, much slower than it is today. Jack Lemmon, one of the hosts, introduces writer and academy president Daniel Taradash who says of Chaplin: “A few years ago, Mr. Chaplin said, ‘my only enemy is time.’ We respectfully disagree. For whoever and whenever there is communication, a screen and an audience, whether here on earth and now or in some unfathomable future on some faraway star, time is Charlie Chaplin’s dearest and eternal friend.”
For 20 minutes, muffled by the buzz of the cassette’s audio, the only sounds are from the lush violins and crashing cymbals of the orchestra playing over a montage of Chaplin’s films. Flickering images, a rush of shadows dissolving into light. Scratches pulsate across illuminated faces, mouths moving wordlessly — The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times … our laughter blends with the response from the audience inside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
No words are needed; we watch mostly in silence — as if we’re gathered in a darkened theater in the 1920s watching the ghostly light of hypnotic images. Silence occasionally punctuated by laughter: That’s my voice, isn’t it? Awwww I say. Maybe I see Chaplin’s Little Tramp with a downcast look, or his trademark waddle. Then a burst of giggles when he attempts to roller skate. Or sniffs the flower in his lapel.
Rapid movements, grainy scratches, eyes that communicate with one luminous look. The orchestra swells. then slows to a mournful solo violin.
The tape warbles; the music strains. Then, a sudden trumpet. And Mom’s voice, clear and certain, rises above the sound. “When someone like this says, ‘my only enemy is time’ he knows what he’s talking about.”
I rewind.
Mom, engaged, enthralled, her voice, her diction. “When someone like this says, ‘my only enemy is time’ he knows what he’s talking about.”
Loren King is a Boston-based freelance arts journalist and film critic. An excerpt from her memoir-in-progress was selected for a “Tell-All Boston” live reading in October, 2025.