alenxa and I had everything planned out for Saturday afternoon and evening. We were going to catch Mirrormask for the second time at 4:30, have dinner, then see Serenity again at 8:00-ish. Then if we were up to it, we’d catch a late-night showing of Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
Yeah, right.
It started out okay, though we ended up going straight from a late lunch to the theater. We suffered–I mean sat–through the end of the dreaded Twenty, the theater’s own ads came up…and it stopped on the “Please silence your cell phone” slide for several minutes.
After the audience started making comments about the mishap (one guy in a group of about 6-8 a few rows in front of us turned around at one point to announce “Don’t worry, we won’t be this loud during the movie!”), the previews started. Well, the previews’ sound track started. It stopped, switched to a movie theater “radio” station which introduced a singer, and a few lines into the song, the previews started again–still with no picture. After five rounds of this (with the intro starting over each time), the theater sent two people in to announce that the projector bulb had burned out and they couldn’t replace it until the next showing, so they were handing out free tickets to come to another show. This was complicated by the fact that the person making the announcement was a soft-spoken Asian girl and the music was still playing at full volume, so people were relaying the info to the other side of the theater.
Oh, the free tickets are bright red and labeled, “Emergency Ticket.”
Well, we knew there weren’t any showings of Serenity that would be done in time to come back for the next showing, so we went home, grabbed the Calendar section of the newspaper, and looked to see what was nearby. We found a showing of Wallace and Gromit in town at 5:10. It was 5:10. We rushed over to the theater, trusting to previews to keep us from missing any of the movie, but the showing was sold out. So we figured we’d go home for an hour, then hit a 7-ish showing of Serenity and come back to Mirrormask at 10:00.
So we arrived at the Block at 7:00, all set to grab tickets for the 7:10 showing of Serenity…only to discover that we’d gotten the show times mixed up with the Spectrum, and instead of 7:10 and 7:50, they were 6:45 and 7:50. We went for the 7:50 showing, even though there was no way we could get back to UCI by 10:00, but noticed there was a 10:05 showing of Wallace and Gromit and decided to just go for it. It left us with only a 5-minute bathroom break between movies, but it worked.
Forget “Plan B.” By the time we had everything settled, we were onto at least plan E!
So tonight, if all goes well, we’re taping Lost, grabbing dinner out somewhere, and seeing MirrorMask again with our “emergency tickets.”