Beware the rare Date Night

My husband and I have this odd problem, or rather a few odd problems. We both tend to almost always forget our wedding anniversary (he remembered it this year for the first time in about 5 years, so I had to yell at him for that), and we just never go out to eat in one of those things they call a restaurant.

We do that once a year when we’re spending a month in Florida where my stepdaughter and younger stepson live, but other than that, the only time we ever eat any meal in a restaurant is when we actually get around to doing a dinner and movie Date Night thing for our anniversary. And even then, we almost always do it at least a couple months late, because we kind of just forget that somehow, too.

(Yes, we may be odd that way, but oh well – at least our relationship is easy and breezy.)

But I digress. We finally, this last Friday, managed to squeeze our sometimes yearly Date Night into our non-busy schedule. A mere two months late. Because we’re both huge Julia Roberts fans (Jim because he likes to stare at her and drool a bit, me because I like her laugh, her spirit, and the way she loves her family so deeply), we wanted to see Eat, Pray, Love before it was entirely gone from theaters in this area. We were shocked to find out the show-times had already been reduced to only two per night, and neither time worked out well for us wanting to also eat at a fancy restaurant.

(Well actually, I felt the 9PM showing would’ve worked just fine, but Jim said NO WAY – he wasn’t leaving the theater at 11:30 and getting home at midnight. Can you spell G-E-T-T-I-N-G  O-L-D?) So anyway, I found a theater in another town that had a 4PM showing, which meant we could make our dinner reservations at 7:00 (at a far more expensive restaurant that serves far less delicious food) and eat really close to our normal time.

Here’s where it got hilarious. We pull into this huge (for our extremely rural area) theater’s parking lot and our car was the only one in it. “Ooooh, where should we park? This is so confusing!” We managed to get our hilarity under control in time to go buy our tickets, then our popcorn and a crappy fountain drink to share. The extremely young ticket sales person told us the extremely young concession stand person would take our tickets, since the ticket-taker wasn’t there that early in the day. That’s fine, whadda we care who takes our tickets?

Okay, so our movie is in the first theater. We step inside and “Whoa!” It was literally pitch black in there. We started whispering silly stuff like “Can you see anything?” “No, can you?” “No, do you think there are chairs and a screen in here?” “I’m not sure, do you think there are other humans in here?” (We decided there must not be, since no-one laughed at us.)

We just stood there for a good long while, cracking ourselves up saying hilarious things to each other, until I finally realized I could make out the glowing green strips running along the aisles. We still couldn’t see any seats, but I told Jim to follow my voice while I ran my hand over the rows of chairs, all the while depending on glowing green things to guide me. I chose a row at random, went to the center, and down we sat.

Now mind you, we got in that theater about 2 minutes after the movie should’ve started and yet we munched popcorn – and munched popcorn – and cracked ourselves up some more over how we’d never had a theater to ourselves, should we maybe consider doing some hanky-panky stuff while it was still pitch black in there? Finally I realized it was 4:20 and we were going to have a problem with our dinner reservations if they didn’t get that movie started FAST. (By the way, we could actually make out the seats and ghostly white screen by then, so we weren’t so disoriented.)

I made my way back out of the theater, marched to the concession stand and told one of The Children that our movie was supposed to have started at 4:00, was there a problem? He was absolutely shocked. He checked their schedule and said “Oh gosh, I’ll see if I can find a projectionist for you and we’ll get it started right away.” (I just now rolled my eyeballs remembering this. But I was very sweet to The Child.)

By 4:30 our movie started and all was well. I loved Eat, Pray, Love – but then I’d made sure I hadn’t read the book first (which always ruins movies since they have to leave SO much detail out) – and Jim was happy because he got to stare at Julia on a really big screen. I gave the movie 4 out of 5 stars, but Jim only gave it 2.75 stars because he couldn’t understand anybody in it who talked with an Italian accent, a Bali accent, an Indian accent, or a Brazilian accent. (This was basically everybody but Julia. Oh, and Richard.)

Okay, so we had fun during the movie and then we rushed like hell to the restaurant, arriving only 12 minutes late. Whew! Unfortunately, our meal left much to be desired. The salad… oh man, what can I say about that salad? We eat huge, fancy red leaf lettuce salads with tons of toppings almost every night. The fancy restaurant had limp leaf lettuce (I actually had one slimy piece), and all it had for “fixin’s” was 2 tiny cherry tomatoes and two pathetic, watery cucumber slices with absolutely huge seeds in them. Jim ate his salad anyway. I didn’t. Not after I found that slimy piece of lettuce.

Our prime rib…. It was just missing something. There was no au jous flavor…. In fact there was pretty much no flavor at all, which was just SO odd. We truly couldn’t figure that one out. The vegetable was skinny frozen rubbery green beans, and since we’re used to green beans from our garden right now…. Well you can imagine how exciting they seemed. We’d both ordered sweet potato chunks, and those were great! I mean, really – how can you go wrong with something (overcooked but still delicious) that tastes like brown sugar?

So anyway, considering the quality of the food, we were not impressed with our bill that came to $74 with the 20% tip in there. (Oh yeah, we really liked our waitress. A lot, which is why we kept saying everything was just fine.) We’ll just never go back there, and we’ll make sure we tell everybody we know they shouldn’t go there either. But hey, at least it was near the theater that had the 4:00 showing of the movie we wanted to see, and isn’t that what really counted?

I may have just now rolled my eyeballs wildly. But at least I was laughing while I did it, and that definitely really counts.

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