Saturday Matinee

Yesterday afternoon we chanced the new Toy Story movie at the local movie theater. 
            Mr Tabubil wanted to know: "Can we bring in our own snacks?  Only if we can't, I need to wear a larger jacket."  
            Mr Tabubil is the Lord High Acolyte of smuggling food into a movie theater - and his friend Gordon is the Grand High Priest.  Back in Canada, where the weather was cold and the coats were heavy, he would walk into a cinema with a 2L bottle of soda in each pocket, and Gordon would be carrying a whole KFC chicken dinner.

We were the littlest bit trepedatious about taking in a matinee.
            Mr Tabubil wanted to know: "Are we going to be able to see the screen for all the flying popcorn?"
            I took his hand and told him that whatever happened, it couldn't be worse than the time we went to see The Lion King in suburban San Francisco on opening weekend in 1994.  We went together - Mum, Dad, my sister, and me.  The popcorn was flying like a salty white blizzard, babies were screaming like tin whistles, parents ran up and down the aisles chasing hysterical toddlers with voices like piccolo foghorns and then the lights went down and the noise level rose.
            A shaft of light broke the darkness - the door at the back of the theater opened and we could see a father stumbling down the aisle, hugging Jumbo-sized tubs of popcorn and buckets of soda to his chest.   He stopped, blind in the dark, halfway down to the screen.
            "Vera?"  He quavered.  "Vera?!"
            On the far side of the room, across two aisles and a storm of pre-teens, a hand waved vaguely through the popcorn gale.
            "Simon?"
            "Vera?   I can't see you!!!" His voice cracked and he swung his head desperately back and forth, squinting into the murky, popcorn-scented darkness.  His nerve broke, visibly, and he looked ready to bolt.
            The four of us smiled nastily at each other and settled back in our seats to enjoy the show.

Our matinee was almost an anticlimax- only one shower of popcorn - barely a drizzle, really, and I didn't even notice the comings and goings of the bathroom breaks - possibly because I had napkins from the snack bar jammed into my ears trying to reduce the sound of the film track down to a manageable level.
            I've heard dire stories about our sweet little cinema, but as most of ones about spiders come from the same source that told me Not to Drink the Water or I'd DIE of Red Earth, I tend to discount the more extreme reports. ("And that was when the giant huntsman crawled onto the back of my chair-")
            Nothing chewed its way out of the armrest.   Nothing fell out of the ceiling.  It is simply a pretty little country cinema that specializes in blink-and-you-miss 'em runs of major hollywood blockbusters and midnight marathons of the Twilight movies.  (They know their demographic.)  With the occasional managable hitch in the screening room.
            And the movie was awful sweet.  Do go see it.