To the Movies--Alone ...

I haven't gone to the movies by myself for a long, long time. It's happened only rarely since my marriage on December 20, 1969. Joyce loves movies, too, so we go pretty much every weekend--sometimes both Friday and Saturday. We'll see most anything--with a few exceptions. Horror/slasher films (neither of us cares for them). Kids' cartoons. Movies aimed principally at teenagers--though we used to go to these when I was teaching: I liked talking with my students about them. (And so I saw Kick-Ass and Twilight and countless others.)

Joyce also knows that in some ways I remain ... immature (is that a nice word?). I will go see films she would never go to--Die Hard movies, for example. Red and Red 2.  She does not like me to mention on Facebook that she's with me on those occasions, so I comply. She goes only because she loves me. She endures the films--not always silently, though, as countless on-the-way-home car-conversations can certify.

Anyway, Joyce has not liked airplanes, not since, early in our marriage, when we were in a holding pattern over Chicago in a thunderstorm. We bounced noisily above the Windy City for about 100 years until O'Hare decided to get us out of the sky. That effaced the romance of flying for her. Permanently. (I can't say I loved that experience, either, but I've flown since--though nowadays I hate the entire experience--but that's meat for another blog post.) She's flown only once or twice in the last forty years. But that's all right. I love long drives--especially when she's beside me.

So when we started seeing the trailers for Non-Stop, the recent Liam Neeson film that takes place almost entirely in an airplane (a plane under threat), I knew I wasn't going to be seeing it until it hit one of the cable channels and I could watch it while she was working in her study late into the evening. That's all right. I've done that many, many, many times.

Interruption: There have been times I've gone alone to the movies--usually when she or I am out of town. I tend to go see, in those conditions, films I know she wouldn't like to see, anyway. Something with Jason Statham, say. But very rarely have I gone to a film when we were both in town. It seems somehow ... disloyal or something.

But I did last night (Tues.). She had planned to go to a talk by a local historian. I didn't feel up to it. But as the day wound along, I realized I was feeling up to an airplane movie--an airplane-under-threat movie. When I "shared" this information, Joyce was very happy for me (now she would not have to go! though I don't think she ever would have, no matter what trump card I laid on the table).

So off I drove to Cinemark at Macedonia and sat in a small crowd (a half-dozen others?) and watched Liam Neeson do what he seems always to be doing in his recent films: using his "special set of skills" to thwart a variety of Evil Ones who don't usually survive long enough to benefit from Neeson's tutelage.

I also did something else I haven't done in about a year--buy a bag of popcorn. Joyce and I have been avoiding the stuff in recent months (salt, oil, etc.), but the aroma just got me in the lobby, and before I knew it, I was munching cheerfully with my own (medium) bag. I should say here that Joyce and I have never "shared" popcorn very well. We used to buy a large tub, then found that our hands were colliding quite frequently superjacent to and/or in the tub. It was all very primitive, Darwinian. And not very pretty. Which is one reason we don't do it any more, I think--salt and oil be damned.

I got home to discover that Joyce had mistaken the evening of the meeting--Thursday, not Tuesday--so there it was: the possibility of a second film-by-myself this week.

About two in the morning I woke, nauseated, the evils in the popcorn reminding me of one of the reasons I'd quit eating eat.

Never again, I swore.

Wonder what's on at Macedonia tonight?