The State Theatre in Kasson, Minnesota opened in 1937, spent the sixties and seventies as a series of churches, and came back to life as a movie house in 1998 when two sisters, Nicole Bjerke and Heidi Alberts, bought the building and rebuilt it. Their company was called JorEll Inc—the first halves of their daughters’ names, smashed together.
They gave me a job while I was still in high school. I opened and closed the business, threaded film, tallied customers, took inventory, and directed one or two employees. My résumé also lists:
Implemented automated tools for some tasks.
I do not remember what that was. Probably something small in Excel, or possibly just a line to puff up the résumé.
Once, the audience had to tell me the film had stopped. A frame jammed in front of the projection lamp. The image froze on the screen. Then a white-hot dot formed in the middle of it and grew outward, slowly, with a red fringe. At first it was hard to tell that it was not part of the movie, because it sat right on the frozen frame; or that is what everyone’s brain wanted to think. I was not watching the movie from where I worked. Someone came down, I saw them on the camera, and I shut the show down and gave everyone their money back.
I remember it as a horror movie, maybe The Ring, though I may have attached that title later because it fits too well.
That ended when my family moved back to Montana. I finished high school in Sidney, graduated, and spent the next year and a half climbing oil rigs to point satellite dishes and modeling wireless coverage for two tiny LLCs in Fairview. Eventually that chapter was closing too, and I landed back in the Kasson area for a semester of community college in nearby Rochester.
I came back to build their website. The existing site at kassontheatre.com had a showtimes page built by KM Telephone, the local telephone company.
I replaced it with a PHP application I built end to end: a full-viewport, black-background site with Flash trailers, movie and event pages, and—the part I cared about—a web-based administrative interface, so the theater could update its own showtimes without calling anybody.
I described it on my résumé as:
First commercial development project attempted (currently pending rewrite in PyJS; some broken features).
The rewrite never happened, and the site ran as-built for a few years before a generic CMS template replaced it. Nicole and Heidi continued running the theater until they sold it in 2020.
When I applied for development work at Broker Exchange Network in Rochester—the job where I picked up Python—the theater site was the portfolio. A PHP application with its own admin panel, built alone for a paying client, running a few miles down the road: it gave me working software to show at the interview. And two years later, when I was job-hunting again, the résumé’s reference block still led with the theater’s owners, right next to a developer from BrokerBin’s four-person team.