Five years ago, I was in Hawaii. You see, Friday was Our Anniversary. Five years later, we have one adorable kid, another on the way, a house in suburbia with a monster mortgage, and after two freezing winters in Baltic Europe we get to spend the next three years living on an island which has never seen temperatures recorded below 44 degrees. So life is pretty good.
But you see, celebrating our nuptials seems to be fraught with hazards for us. Five years ago, I was in Hawaii - three days after the wedding. Why three days? Because the airlines wouldn't board us the morning after. The tickets were in my married name, and I hadn't brought the marriage certificate with us because hey, that's an important piece of paper, wouldn't want to lose that - so we gave it to our best man for safekeeping. It was less than a month after a particularly horrific episode that made the airlines very skittish about boarding *anyone*, so of course the bleary-eyed couple with new jewelry, tickets to Hawaii in the names of Mr and Mrs, and just shy of having rice falling out of our hair? We were clearly not bona fide honeymooners, we must have been up to no good, we must have wanted to hijack the plane to Cuba or something.
Today's adventure in Attempting to Celebrate Our Wedded Bliss was on a more modest scale. We both took the day off from work to catch a matinee movie while Gigi was at day care. We haven't been to the movies in three months, at least. No Clerks 2, no Wicker Man, no Snakes on a Plane, none of that for us, nosiree. But this weekend, The Departed came to our island. And it was our anniversary. So we had lunch at a little cafe in town, went to the even littler theatre, and settled into our seats for a few hours of escapism. The reviews had been good, I'm okay with giving my money to Martin Scorcese, and let's see how well Matt Damon's Southie accent has held up since Good Will Hunting.
Our story starts out well enough. Despite the size of the theatre and screen leaving you with the expectation that you're going to hear "Ladies and gentlemen,this is your captain speaking, today's cruising altitude should be..." it was a decent place. And the lady at the concession stand gave me free candy when she saw the size of my belly. And Jack Nicholson's character is as loathsome as he oughta be, and Leo D reminds us all that he really can act (forget the sinky boat thing, go see Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet. You're welcome.) And wow, it's a cool story and Martin Scorcese really is a brilliant director, and we're just at the denouement when blurWHIRRblurrrrr Hey, what's wrong with the picture? BLURRRRRwhirrrBlurwhirrrWhapWhapWhapWhap
I kid you not. Ten minutes shy of the end of the best movie I've seen so far this year, and the projector eats it. And they can't fix it in time for us to catch the end before picking up Gigi.
This being an island of under 100,000 full-time residents, we don't get too many movies in the theatre with a shelf life of over one week. Which means The Departed will likely live up to its name as of Thursday. So Hubby and I have three days left to either persuade the manager to hold this movie over so we can use our consolation freebie coupons without missing two workdays, or we wait several months until video.
One advantage Baltic Europe had over this place: instantaneous bootleg DVDs.
Happy Anniversary to us.