Some Mondays

A little more about “Mondays are dark”:

The Oxford English Dictionary has among its definitions for the adjective dark: “Of a theatre or cinema: closed; not in use.” Its first citation is from 1889, from the Sunday Sentinel, a Milwaukee newspaper: “The Standard theater will be dark during a portion of the present week, commencing tomorrow.”

I found this item from 1890:

[New York Amusement Gazette, August 11, 1890.]

And almost a century later:

[New York, April 18, 1988.]

One can find more examples in Google Books of theaters dark on Mondays. “Mondays are dark” appears in a number of issues of New York in 1988. The phrasing also pops up in The New Yorker in (1964) and elsewhere. In Las Vegas, Mondays Dark is a twice-monthly variety show raising money for charities.