That urban American cultural icon, and improvised Superman dressing room, the pay phone.
Not a surprise really. With the proliferation of cell phones, the pay phone and phone booth were on borrowed time.
I always felt there was a class system when it came to pay phones. There were the thick wooden phone booths, like the ones you can still find at Philippe's downtown, or Musso's in Hollywood. Then there were the metal ones, filled with graffiti and wreaking of urine, that you'd find on the corner of every gas station.
There are any number of movies where someone is on the pay phone, in a phone booth, at night, in the rain. The romance of those shots rarely matched the reality of trying to hold the receiver a few inches away from your face in case some of the nastier germs decided to make the leap.
Despite the inherent risk of using them, I miss pay phones. Not half-booth ones like above that got such a huge laugh in Superman II, but real ones.
When I'm at a place like the restaurants I named, I make it a point to call someone. I love the feeling of ducking into the booth, closing the door and shutting out the world.
Barring finding out I actually came from another planet, which many people I work with believe, the phone booth is probably as close to being Superman as I'm going to get.
The romance of the phone booth was also captured in the song Operator by Jim Croce. In it, he has a conversation with a pay phone operator, asking her to connect him to a lost love. It's a song I always loved, maybe because it reminds me of nights before cell phones, when I was on a pay phone trying to get back together with someone.
Or maybe I'm just a sap. It could be that too.
