While searching for photos of the much-missed Kaleidoscope Video, I asked an old employee, Paula, if she had any. She told me she didn’t and neither did any of her old coworkers, adding that the store was very much like “Brigadoon with porn.”
She’s really not that far off.
Now a dusty clock repair place, the mythical video store that, as I remember it, once sat at 3420 N. MacArthur Blvd., was very much a gateway drug for film geeks and other assorted losers who were addicted to the dark gleam of the magnetic tape that was housed deep inside the oft-worn cases, movies with titles that had many of our parents double-checking the rating, lest there be any bare bosoms amongst the constant blood-letting.
Hearing about the place through the various grapevines that I frequently picked from, I was able to convince my father to take me one Friday afternoon, circa the summer of ’93. Armed with about twenty dollars of lawn-mowing money that I bilked from a neighbor earlier that day, suddenly films that I had only read about in then-recent copies of Hitch, Psychotronic, Film Threat and other assorted film ‘zines were notably at my beck and call, titles like Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks and Demoniac, two of the first I ever rented there, based on the covers alone.