I May Have Been A Juvenile Delinquent
I miss going to the movies. It makes me sad that a pastime that was so revered when I was growing up is slowly disappearing. I get it. With 85” televisions, why would anyone pay the ridiculously increasing cost of a movie ticket to sit in a freezing cold theatre, with annoyingly loud sound, equally annoying commercials, and even more annoying neighbors when at home you can throw a pillow at someone who is talking and pause the movie when you have to pee. It’s kind of a no brainer.
Nevertheless, I can’t help but think about the lengths we went to just to see a movie. I made fake IDs to get into R-rated movies; we hid people in the trunk so four of us could see the drive-in movie for the price of two; and we sometimes walked five miles (once in a blizzard!) to the theatre. (I remember it being a long walk, but I was shocked when I recently mapped it.) And the trunk thing is unbelievable especially since now I’m the one who gets nervous just sitting in the passenger seat.
But movies were all we really had. Not only that, but once you missed a movie, chances were you’d never get to see it. If you were lucky, you might catch it on network TV years later, poorly edited for television with tons of commercials.
I guess we’ll always have the memory of our movie going days, which unbelievably also included smoking in the theatre.
It’s posts like this that make me think, how old am I? And, was I a juvenile delinquent?
