The Library for the Performing Arts Reserve Film & Video Collection

If you take US Route 20 heading east from Albany, New York, you will eventually drive through the rural village of Nassau. There are three gas stations, a couple of pizza places and a trailer-cum-restaurant on the empty lot where Delson’s department store stood until it burned to the ground in the early 1980s. Past the village’s one traffic light, on the right is a small white building with a black sign in front: Nassau Free Public Library. Most of this two-room branch of the Upper Hudson Library System is taken up by the children’s and young adult section. When I was growing up five miles outside of Nassau, it was a favorite place to visit. Mrs. Sherman was the branch librarian, kind, grey-haired, soft-spoken. I remember vividly the feeling of security and sanctuary I felt as a very small child, looking at book after book while perched on a wooden foot stool.

For me, however, the most significant aspect of the Nassau Free Public Library was its children’s film screenings. Tuesday nights at 7:30, the children in this small corner of Rensselaer County would gather in the basement, parents sequestered in the adult reading room upstairs or the Stewart’s gas station and coffee shop down the street. I can still envision the experience of my first movie night. All of us kids sitting on the floor in front of the projector while a color 16mm film was shown: a boy running through a summer field. It wasn’t just that this was a motion picture - after all, this was 1980, not 1880- but that it was our motion picture. Something made just for children and being shown just to children.  read more »