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Thursday, April 08, 2004

reliving your youth 101

Yesterday was a rare thing: I had the house to myself (yes, MYSELF) from about 9:30 on. That's when my parents came by to say hi, and I nearly begged them to take the kids because T and I wanted to go see Return of the King at the "old" theater in the next city over in the evening while we still could. See, a big new megaplex came in downtown and now the theater by the mall is reduced to the level of a dollar theater, with second-run kind of movies -- is that what second-run means? Movies that are no longer in the little top five box at IMDB and are only a month or two from coming out on video? I am definitely not fluent in film-ese -- except that it doesn't COST a dollar, it still costs EIGHT FREAKING FIFTY. ANYWAY. I found out on Tuesday that ROTK was playing there, which it hadn't been on the weekend so I don't know how that happened seeing as theaters generally only change their movies on Fridays, right? But whatever. Anyway. I just read the trilogy for the first time, having been a loyal C.S. Lewis acolyte for years, but having never been able to "get into" Tolkien until this year, and T and I had rented the first two movies on DVD and enjoyed them a great deal -- me in spite of all the STUPID CHANGES they made.

Good LORD I am straying off topic in every direction here. Breathe, Rachel. [pause]. OK.

So we wanted to go to the movies so I begged my parents to take the kids and they DID, they went and had a marvelous time helping Dad cut pipe. And while I was lonely (I really honestly do enjoy my own children's company -- so sue me), I was kind of looking forward to a day of, oh, reading, and relaxing, and going to the library, and maybe getting a little housework done. But here's what happened instead. Right after the kids left, the pest control guy called about the enormous seething mass of carpenter ants which is trying to eat the underside of my house as I speak. He said he would be by "sometime after noon". I mopped the floor and cleaned the kitchen, realized I had fully missed my library window since I had to be back by noon, thought, oh no, what if the man needs to look INSIDE the house, dashed around cleaning, folded some laundry (watching Pride and Prejudice, of course; my hands don't know how to fold laundry if Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy aren't on the screen in front of me. Honestly I tried using "How to Lose A Man in 10 Days" [which is a vapid but funny movie, rented not owned] and it just didn't work), and then I finally at least had a little time to sit down and read. Which was nice. But my days-to-myself never end up quite like I think they will. At least I did relive my youth a bit while I tidied up -- I was listening to Tchaikovsky. I played "1812 Overture" and "Marche Slave" twice each, complete with goofy ballet moves and multiple breaks to conduct the parts that you just simply HAVE to conduct. Or I do anyway. Romantic-era music is just perfect for those hormone-laden teenage years, what with all the passion and agony and ecstasy and the drawn-out-ha-you-just-THOUGHT-it-was-over-but-really-we're-going-to-drag-out-the-beautiful-agony-just-a-little-bit-longer endings. I spent half my time when I was seventeen, it seems like, lying on my bed in my room conducting Tchaikovsky and Rossini and even the occasional bit of Beethoven and Schumann even though they were Classical rather than Romantic (but oh, the pain! the beautiful pain!).

ANYWAY again. Eventually T made it home and we made it just in time to the theater, and check this out: we had the whole place to ourselves. Well, not the whole BUILDING, I'm sure there were people in there watching, say, Scooby Doo or Hidalgo or whatever, but the whole, what, auditorium? (again with the lack of film-ese fluency). It was like being in our living room, except the screen was oh so much bigger, and of course the diet Coke cost $4.50. But we had comfy chairs with chairholders and we could sit there and talk out loud to each other about the movie, and I could narrate what was going on for T while he had his eyes covered because of that HORRID HUGE CREEPY WRETCH of a spider -- who belonged in the second book anyway and what was UP with that? I liked the movie better than The Two Towers -- fewer changes from the book, and more understandable ones. I am such a book-to-movie-adaptation snob that sometimes I think I should just put myself under a moratorium and just not watch anything I've read the book for; it would keep me from throwing things at my TV nearly so often. But I can't. And Gollum was worth it, just perfect, he compensated for everything.

So at the end of THAT movie, just as Bilbo and Frodo were about to get in the boat with the elves -- whoops, hope everyone's seen that by now -- we realized that if I just told T the rest of the story, we could JUST make it in time to watch The Passion of the Christ. Being good Christians, of course we were feeling all guilted out (actually, the Christianese term is "convicted", and yes, there IS a language where I'm frighteningly fluent -- I don't know what "second-run" means for sure but I can use words like "Christophany" or "apologetics" or "koinonia" in a sentence...) for using our sitter-tunity to watch ROTK instead of The Passion -- our reasoning being that The Passion would still be available for weeks or months but ROTK wouldn't, but that felt like, you know, leftovers instead of firstfruits or something. ANYWAY. T dashed to an ATM (no we did NOT theater-hop, I know you were thinkin' that) and we bought two tickets for The Passion and for the first time since I was maybe nine I watched two movies in a theater in the same day. (the last time was Gremlins and The Neverending Story in a double-feature, just so you know). And for the first time since the incredibly lame Body of Evidence (which I watched on a date with an equally lame guy), I watched a late movie. Oh my, when I woke up this morning I had all the convincing I ever needed that I am not as young as I used to be.