Years ago, when Tom Mahoney was a rookie movie theater projectionist, the audience unexpectedly started laughing - rollicking, actually - during a Star Trek film.

"I was so nervous, I put the film in upside down. The audience was roaring, and I felt humiliated," said Tom, who survived that disaster to become head projectionist, night manager and finally manager of the movie house.

The theater is actually part - some people say the best part - of the town hall in Newtown, a quiet western Connecticut town, where they still call the village green a pasture. It's one of the few theaters where you can watch a movie for two bucks and buy popcorn without reaching for a $5 bill.

I passed through Newtown Wednesday on my walk across the U.S. in search of the heartbeat of America at the start of a new century. This week I walked from Hartford, CT to Brewster, NY - a commuter hub about 50 miles north of Manhattan. I visited the Mark Twain House in Hartford, I walked from the blue collar East Hartford and the struggling west side of the city to trendy West Hartford and Farmington, which boasts sites on the state's Freedom Trail and Women's Heritage Trail.

TWO UNUSUAL THEATERS

Newtown isn't the only Connecticut community with a theater in its Town Hall. The Thomaston Opera House is has one of the nation's few live theaters in a town hall. La Cage Aux Folles will open this month, then it's Fiddler on the Roof, Grease and Ragtime; all on the renovated top floor of the 130 year-old Town Hall building.

Technical Director Paul Revaz, of Thomaston Opera House works behinds the scenes to rig a curtain for their upcoming performance LaCage. Paul handles many aspects for the Opera House in Thomaston, CT - which is one of the few performance theaters built within a Town Hall.

"This area came very close to being converted into office space in the early 1990s," Technical Director Paul Revaz said as he surveyed the theater from a backstage perch.

Neither Revaz nor Newtown's Mahoney is in it for the money. Revaz, 34, took a small role in a play more than a decade ago has been with the theater ever since.

"It gets under your skin," he said, noting that the Opera House draws actors and audiences from most of western Connecticut. He's not sure what draws him to the theater, but it has something to do with the adrenalin final week of nonstop rehearsals and opening night.

Tom Mahoney, the theater manager, works on a movie projector for the Edmund Town Hall Theater in Newtown, Ct. He competes with large movie theaters and video release dates to obtain second-hand family and independent movies to present to local residents on a weekly basis.

In Newtown, Mahoney's found his ideal job. He loves films and he loves the 500-seat theater where he saw his first movie more than 40 years ago. (It was a Saturday morning kids show.) He recalls watching his favorite film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, all alone in the theater on Christmas Eve. To him, that was a perfect night.

Today, you might spot Tom sitting in the back of the theater watching the audience as much as the film. Or you might catch him greeting people and thanking them for coming as they leave the theater.

The theater will turn 75 next year and Tom is hoping to raise enough money for a major renovation.

THE TIME MACHINE

Our coast-to-coast walk began in Provincetown, MA and will continue along Route 6 to Long Beach, CA. Photographer Travis Lindhorst drops me off each morning and picks me up at night. We spend our nights in local hotels and inns, where owners have been incredibly generous. Check our website route6walk.com for updates, details and the names of people who've helped us on our journey.

We chose Route 6 because it's the longest (or second longest depending on how you calculate) highway in the nation, even though in many places it's simply a two-lane byway. But in the Northeast we could have selected Route 6 for its history. The road is a time machine.

Colonial soldiers traveled what is now Route 6 during the Revolutionary War because inland roads were safer than the coastal highways controlled by the British. Whether you're in Bolton on the eastern side of the state, suburban Southbury, Newtown or Farmington, you'll see roadside signs noting that French General Rochambeau passed this way route to the Battle of Yorktown.

But that's just part of area's rich past. You could spend a week visiting museums on the 20 mile stretch from Hartford to Thomaston. In Bristol, there's a Carousel Museum, a clock museum (this was the cradle of modern clock making). Nearby there's a small lock museum. The Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe houses sit side-by-side on Farmington Avenue in Hartford.

OF HEROS AND HEROINES

The Hill-Stead Museum is on a very steep hill in Farmington (well, the address is 35 Mountain Avenue.) It's not directly on our route, but I hoped Hill-Stead would give me a deeper understanding of Farmington's role in the Amistad trial. It was 4:30 on Good Friday, but gave it a shot and trudged up the hill. What can I say, "I'm an optimist."

When I arrived at the white and green mansion, there wasn't a car in sight. Uh, oh. I tried a few doors and peered inside. It looked like a lost cause. Then a friendly security guard emerged and told me a little about the museum. After all that mountain climbing, it turns out that Hill-Stead, has no connection to Amistad.

I could have learned more about Amistad by visiting Farmington's Historical Society or the Austin Williams House, which was built for the 53 Africans while they were on trial for hijacking the Amistad, a slave ship taking them to Cuba. The house, along with many Underground Railroad sanctuaries, are part of the state's Freedom Trail.

The Freedom Trail includes an Amistad Monument and a full sized replica of the ship, both in New Haven.

Hill-Stead, an art museum, was designed by Theodate (cq) Pope Riddle - one of the first licensed female architects in the nation. That's enough to put the museum on the Women's History Trail, which is a series of sites across the state that highlight women's achievements. Other stops include the Stowe house and the Windham Textile and History Museum, where visitors can glimpse of the lives of women who worked in the mills.

The Prudence Crandall Museum in Canterbury is also on the women's trail. Prudence, Connecticut's official heroine, turned a sedate section of the state into an inferno, when she opened a school for black girls in the 1830s. Townspeople shunned her, stoned the school and eventually set it afire. The state passed a law banning the school and Crandall was arrested when she wouldn't back down.

By luck, and the generosity of the innkeepers, I spent a night in the Brooklyn, CT house where Prudence stayed during the trial. It gave me a tingle to know I was in a small way connected to history.

I got the same feeling, but more powerfully, when I stopped at the Twain House, a building chuck full of reminders of Twain's eclectic life. He wrote most of his books here and went broke here, too.

You can see the gas lamp he converted into the equivalent of an extension cord and visit the tiny greenhouse, where he played hide and seek with his daughter. You can peek out onto the porch outside Twain's his attic writing room where he hid from unwanted visitors and bill collectors while his assistant told the guests that Twain has stepped out.

Now, isn't that just like Mark Twain.

ANOTHER RAINY DAY
Rain doesn't dampen Joe Hurley's spirit as he walks along Route 6 in Newtown, Ct.

THEN AND NOW

Route 6 between Hartford and Brewster is a study in contrasts. You can walk past stretches of auto dealers, fast food spots and convenience stores in places like Bristol and Thomaston and Danbury; past farms and cow pastures in Watertown; or past rows of antique stores in Woodbury. The area has not yet merged into one big suburb. Hopefully it never will.

In Woodbury, we found C. L. Adams, an old-fashioned hardware store that caters to farmers and celebrities alike. You can scoop nails out of bins for $1.40 a pound, purchase used furniture upstairs or buy enough hay to feed your livestock for months.

"We get two truckloads of feed - that's 46 tons - a week," said owner David Newell who was a schoolteacher in Woodbury before taking over the business his grandfather started in 1905.

But Newell says gentlemen farmers like Ron Howard and Michael J. Fox are customers too.

"It wouldn't be unusual for me to look up and see (playwright) Arthur Miller buying a light fixture here," Newell said. "To us, he's just Art."

Up the road, you'll find the Charcoal Chef, where you just might walk into a Norman Rockwell scene of a bunch of guys sitting at the counter trading barbs with the waitress.

Not much has changed over the decades. "The people here are the same as they've always been. The come in and get their own coffee in the morning. They'll pour their own juice," said owner Judy Doran, 52, whose parents built the restaurant when she was kid.

"I remember Judy going out back to smooch with Jack (now her husband) when she was young. They didn't think anybody was watching," said long-time waitress Esther Townsend.

But it's the long-time customers that make Charcoal Chef interesting.

"We have one customer who comes in at 4:30 every day. He parks in the same spot, he sits at the same table and orders the same thing, a bacon and lettuce sandwich." Doran said, adding that he always reminds them "bacon, well done."

And if he doesn't show up, they'll call his house to make sure he's all right.

At the other end of the scale we have the fast food places, where speed is king. And in this section of New England at least, Dunkin' Donuts with its pink and orange and glass façade is king of the fast food.

There are more Dunkin's than McDonalds, Burger King, Taco Bell, KFC, Starbucks or even Subway. I'd been noticing that since Cape Cod, so I kept track during a 20-mile stretch and counted five Dunkin's, four Subways, two McDonalds and no more than one of anything else.

There were no Dunkins in Woodbury, of course. The town frowns on chain stores. And why would Woodbury want a Dunkin's when it has Phillips' Diner. Gourmet Magazine called Phillips Doughnuts the best in the country. Phillips is also regularly at the top of the doughnut list in Connecticut Magazine. Even the New York Times has written up this unpretentious little place where they only offer only a few varieties, but they're all good. It's the crunch that makes the difference.

JOHN'S LIFE

Heading out of Danbury I met John McDermott, who was watching the world go by from the porch of his Lake Avenue home. John is my age, 59, and retired recently from his job for a food service company.

"Now I don't have to get up early in the morning and I have time to do a lot of things. Most of the time I stand here on the porch, but sometimes I sit," he said.

Not much happens on Lake Avenue, John said. There's an occasional accident or maybe a deer will scamper through one of the yards.

I envied John's simple life.

Congratulations, John. You have something that eludes most of us today: time to stop and smell the flowers.

A DEER TRAGEDY

Just before crossing into New York, I caught a foul smell rising from an embankment next to Route 6. I looked down and saw four dead deer. There were three more, just a few dozen yards away.

I don't know what happened. It's hard to believe they were all hit by vehicles at the same spot. Had someone dumped them there?

It was a sad way to leave Connecticut.

WALKING WITH NEW FRIENDS

John Barrlow (white beard. left) of Bridgewater, and Tom Traver (middle) of Watertown, CT walk with Joe for a couple of miles along the way. John and Tom both 72 years of age, belong to a small walking club. They walk with their friends daily, exploring new routes at home and abroad.