My dad was head of the Hollywood YMCA when I was a kid growing up in the 1950s. It was a big deal to me when stars like Art Linkletter or Charles Bronson would show up to exercise or Bob Hope would appear at a "Y" fundraiser at the Hollywood Bowl. 

   There were others characters who lived at the "Y." Dad explained that these were "bit" players. "Don't blink or you'll miss me, kid," one of them said to me once. I remember some of their names, Wheaton Chambers and Stubby Kruger, for example.

   In movies since then I have often found myself noticing those barely seen people. Some seem like set pieces instead of human beings. Consider the woman & two men in the scene I photographed from the 1950 film noir classic "Gun Crazy"(screenplay by the great, wrongly-blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo.) This picture is beautiful to me. The ticket taker (not in the credits) looks as lonely as a subject in an Edward Hopper painting (notice the shadow slanting above her head.) Moments & people like these evaporate into the ether unnoticed by the millions who saw them on a silver screen for a few seconds. 

   We are all bit players, I suppose. Each film (like every life) is thousands of images strung together & run through a projector at twenty-four frames per second. Yet, each frame is a moment.

   When we review our lives we all say the same thing. Like a movie, it all went so fast. That is because we are not reliving each second. We are compressing our entire lives into a quick reflection. It is an illusion that time flew.

   For caregivers who have learned to live in "the now" every moment is important. So is every so-called "bit player." 

-Erie Chapman