by FERN SHEN
By turns ebullient, wistful and defiant, outgoing Senator Theatre owner Tom Kiefaber was all over the lobby Saturday, explaining “I haven’t slept in days,” as employees sold off marquee letters, movie posters, film reels and even cut-up pieces of the deco-patterned carpet from the 70-year-old North Baltimore landmark.

“There’s a thing they call ‘crucifying the zealots’ and I’m learning all about it,” he said, to a couple asking him if they could buy an 18-year-old watercolor depiction of how the Senator might look if it expanded.

For a moment, it looked as if Kiefaber might tell them “no,” but then he deconstructed the framed rendering: how it represented all his thwarted ambition for the grand 900-seat movie house his maternal grandfather opened in 1939, which was now slipping out of his hands. And with one tart remark, Kiefaber seemed to be changing his mind.

“On second thought, why would I want to keep something around that just pissed me off?” he said.

In the end he sent the prospective buyers away saying “Let me think about it.”

Bittersweet Memories
The memorabilia sale is “like a heart-and-soul-ectomy,” Kiefaber said, “the very essence of bittersweet.”

With Kiefaber behind by some $70,000 behind in mortgage payments and the theater scheduled for a foreclosure auction on April 20, the tag sale is an effort to defray legal expenses, pay off the debt and forestall the April 20 auction sale.

Baltimoreans are of two minds about the Senator’s long history of money troubles: supporters say the grand throwback to the days of immense single-screen moviehouses is a priceless gem that should be better protected. Critics cite numerous costly bailouts by the city over the years and question Kiefaber’s business acumen.

Magic wands and wandering hands
There were no critics among the shoppers pawing through piles of “Star Wars” t-shirts and bins of posters in the lobby sale taking place over the weeknd, and scheduled to continue this week.

“We were visiting and heard about this and had to come over,” said a former Dundalk couple, who began going to movies at the Senator when they were first married and living in nearby Cedarcroft.

“I took our son to see “Fantasia” there, it was his first movie. He was just two,” said Fred Krause, 54, of Shrewsbury, Pa., who was looking around the lobby with his wife Sheila Krause, 54.

Kiefaber said some people have shared G-rated memories like the Krauses,’ while others he’s heard wouldn’t have made it past the Legion of Decency.

“A lot of people are telling me their best memories are what they did as couples in the Senator,” he said. “I think they got to every possible base.”

Door to dreams
Kiefaber’s best memory? Being a little kid hanging aorund the theater when his family ran it and watching westerns and thinking that the cowboys were right there, somewhere, next to the building on York Road. He pointed to a side door.

“I kept trying to see whether the horses were on the other side of that door,” he said. “It was the first time I had that confusion between ‘reel’ and ‘real.’”