We went to the theater to see "Gravity" last night. Mmm ... popcorn for supper.
Okay, that makes me want to discuss a peeve. When I was a preschooler in the South, I had dinner around noon every day. I had a deprived childhood. There was no pre-kindergarten or kindergarten for me. I went straight from unfettered childhood to the regimentation of first grade. It was there that I had to start going to a place called the lunchroom to have lunch, a meal that had apparently replaced my dinner. (Later on, they started calling the eating place at school the cafeteria, but I was no dummy. Piccadilly was a cafeteria, and what they had at school didn’t compare.) It wasn’t all bad. I discovered some things that I liked but which my mom had not previously purchased. The first of these revelations was fish sticks. Oh, what a ketchup enhancer those were.
I discovered yogurt years later while at a basketball camp with Junior Shelton at Louisiana College in Pineville. Mom didn’t like yogurt, so it had never found a home in our refrigerator. My daughter, Regan, pronounced it yergurt when she was a youngster. In deference, I now sometimes pronounce it that way myself. She and her sister, Erin, also used to refer to Baskin Robbins as Basket Robbins. They liked to go to the drugstore with me, as they knew I was a softy when they tried to coax me into procuring candy bars for their consumption. They suggested trips to the K&B Drugstore, telling me that we should go to the K and the B.
On one of those K&B visits, I found some Seven Up candy bars. My grandfather used to buy them for me when I was a little boy. He died in 1958 when I was eight. The Seven Ups went away for a really long time. But there they were. I bought the whole box for Erin and Regan … and me. What a trip down memory lane. These bars had seven compartments within them. Each compartment had a different filling. Seven Ups were like a fancy box of chocolates in a single candy bar. We looked for them at K&B after that, but they never had them again. There’s a page on the web that provides the histories of products like that. I found the Seven Up story there. Sure enough, they were around in the Fifties, went away, had a brief rebirth in the Eighties, and quickly returned to their status as a historical footnote.
Anyway, Bob and Jake’s Supper Club in BRLA (If New Orleans
can be NOLA, Baton Rouge (aka Red Stick as in Red Stick Writer) can have BRLA,
pronounced Berla like yergurt.) recognized the correctness of having supper in
the evening after having had dinner at midday.
I can remember when that venerable eatery was in bankruptcy, a sad
day. At the time, Senator Russell Long,
when speaking about some legislation to help avoid a potential bankruptcy of
The Boeing Company, asked on the floor of the U.S. Senate why, if the
government could come to the aid of a big corporation like Boeing, couldn’t it
come to the aid of his friends, the Staples brothers, owners of Bob and Jake’s.
Now, Suzie and I belong to a wonderful dinner club that is
populated with delightful friends. That
said, I have to say that the food would taste better if it was called
supper. We could do the meals at midday
to make the dinner terminology correct, but we’d be less likely to partake of
adult beverages. That would be a shame
because these folks are way fun when they’ve imbibed a bit.
But I digress. So, I
had the popcorn for supper. Sandra
Bullock was my dessert. Do you remember how
they used to tell you that you couldn’t have your dessert until after the
meal? They said that would be putting
the cart before the horse, and that would spoil your meal. Well, I can tell you that Sandra was in front
of, the middle of, and on the backside of my popcorn meal. And she didn’t spoil a damn thing.
Seriously, Bullock performed masterfully. In terms of face time, the whole movie was
just her and George Clooney, and George’s part was limited. The story was interesting and generally kept
you pretty tense throughout and, at times, very tense. We would have chosen to see the regular
rather than the 3D version, but there were only two sessions for that
version. One was a matinee, and the
other was late at night. I didn’t want
popcorn for dinner, and I didn’t want to eat supper too late. It was not lost on me that the price for 3D
was a dollar fifty more than regular, and I repeat, we would have chosen
regular if it had been at an acceptable time.
This was my first 3D movie since a 1966 sci-fi feature
called “The Bubble.” It starred the gal
who starred in “Gidget Goes Hawaiian” and one of the guys from “The Mod
Squad.” Not big box office, it was sort
Rod Sterlingish and dealt with a couple in an airplane forced to land as a
result of a bubble descending to trap them.
I thought of it when the Stephen King TV series, “Under the Dome,” came
out recently.
Over the years, 3D movies have popped up every so
often. The first 3D movie produced by a
major studio was the Warner Bros. 1953 flick, “House of Wax,” starring Vincent
Price. I never saw the 3D version of
this, but when you watch it, you can tell the glitchy things they did to leverage
their 3D presentation. There was a scene
regarding the opening of the House of Wax in which a barker in costume and on
stilts was using bolo paddles in each hand while rambling on about the
stupendous things you’d see in the House of Wax. The rubber bands would stretch to full
extension with the red rubber balls on the ends seemingly thrusting on a
collision path to your nose. There was
some of that sort of imagery in “Gravity.”
My only other encounter with 3D was the 1989 Super Bowl
halftime show sponsored by Coca Cola. I
thought it sucked like something manufactured by the Hoover Vacuum Cleaner
Company.
I’ll grant you that the technology has improved. Personally, though, I find it
distracting. I don’t like wearing the
glasses. I was underwhelmed … except for
Bullock.
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