Thanks to Danny Boyd, I relived my childhood for a few hours last week — and participated in my first film shoot.

Boyd, a veteran filmmaker and assistant professor of communications at West Virginia State University, is working on a feature film called “Makutano” (which means “meeting point” in Kiswahili). The film tells the tale of two boys, one black and one white, born together at the dawn of time but soon separated.

One ends up in the East (Africa); the other lives in the West (America). Their separation throws the world into turmoil, a situation that lasts until they enter adulthood. Both hear messages that inspire them to set out on journeys that eventually restore world harmony.

The message to the “West” character comes during a karaoke scene in a bar. Boyd decided to shoot it on June 30 at Memories, a bar two doors down from the intersection of Central Avenue and Russell Street on Charleston’s West Side. It’s not far from the Park Avenue home that Boyd shares with his fiancée, Robin Broughton, who also is a WVSU communications professor.

As it so happens, my parents bought a house on the same block of Central Avenue when I was just a few months old. We lived there until I was a junior in college.

One of the house’s biggest advantages, in my parents’ opinion, was its close proximity to St. Anthony Catholic Church. They sent four of their five children to the church’s grade school, which still operates today.

Also still operating today are some of the local bars. We were under strict orders not to enter any of them, an edict that I believe all five of us cheerfully ignored. The lure of the candy counters and soda fountains (and pool tables, in one brother’s case) proved too strong. These were neighborhood bars, after all, not rough-and-rowdy honkytonks.

But until last week, there was one I had never ventured into — Memories’ predecessor, the Tap-A-Keg. Best as I can recall, most of the bar-related incidents that prompted police intervention (and there weren’t many) originated at the Tap-A-Keg.

The most spectacular of these was a brawl in which a man crashed through the plate glass window of the establishment across the street. Thus, I had no desire to disobey my parents just to see what the place was like.

I didn’t know what to expect when I crossed the threshold of what in my child’s mind had been a notorious den of iniquity. It turned out to be a cozy nook with a retro rock ’n’ roll feel. The interior design ranges from a row of old 45s serving as a border near the ceiling to life-size Elvis Presley cutouts and prints decorating the walls. I felt comfortable immediately.

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