6 April 2015

In  a 120-seat movie theater on a holiday night…a film of limited-audience appeal at the end of its run…so all seats in the movie theater were empty…but for the two we got comfortable in for ten minutes, warming up. The theater’s half-lit high-hat lights thankfully dimmed, after an assault by the usual string of previews, refreshment reminders, exit door directions and cell phone turnoff requests. We were ready, at long last, for the film. But just as the film was about to begin, four more movie-goers shambled in, eating popcorn and scanning the theater and debating noisily about where to sit…in a virtually empty theater with a luxury of possibilities. They pointed and pondered. Consensus finally reached they, of course, slid into the row of seats directly in front of us. They didn’t skip a row, didn’t sit in a row behind us, not in the same row on the other side of the aisle. They didn’t move in two extra seats, so they wouldn’t be directly in front of us. The whole theater and those were the only four seats that made any sense.

There are times in this life, when you’re too flabbergasted to speak and the only thing that makes sense is to mutter that you can’t fricken believe it and change your seats. But next life, I’m coming back as a knit-brow psycho with a short fuse.