Street Scenes
In the mid-1950s, before I left Iran for school in England, my family lived in an apartment next door to a movie theater. In the summers, we slept on the balconies on the third floor of the building; it was too hot to sleep indoors. Tehran could predictably reach above 100 degrees Fahrenheit every day, and with no air conditioning, sleep inside was nearly unattainable. The theater next door had an outdoor roof terrace where the owners aired films in the summer, and since they had to wait till it was dark, the shows ran quite late. The last show in the summer would end at about midnight, and the crowd from the theater would disperse quickly. The street would grow quiet with only an occasional car driving by and the street vendors and street dwellers would lay out their bedding on the sidewalk and go to sleep. During the day, Shah Reza Avenue was a main thoroughfare with considerable road and foot traffic. Before the show, the delicatessen and bakery teemed with people buying