Yawn and Grope
Thursday, May 3rd, 2007
This week’s question:
Spring is in the air and the film fest is in Tribeca. What do you remember about your very first movie date?
Next week’s question:
The tiff between a MySpace user and the Obama campaign made us wonder— ever felt screwed by a social networking site?
I was with Tamara G, so this was 7th grade. Can’t remember the flick. The point is, I belched. This was before the art of blowing a burp away. My popcorn-and-soda odor drifted to her and she said “Did you just burp?” So I said, “No, YOU did.” And we didn’t say anything for a while. By the end of the movie she still let me put my hand on hers. Many of us— including me—felt she was the hottest girl in our class.
My first date was when the 3-D movies were popular. I had to wait til the marquee went off at the drive in theater. I was so poor the mice didn’t come to our house. We entered the theatre at 9pm, my date had to be home by 11 PM. So we had over an hour to get to know each other. Someone tried to collect money off us when we drove in the exit side of the theatre. I explained how we were told about getting in free by management. The guy replied,” you know Mr. marquee you can come on in!” huh?
The parents made sure they had their eyes and ears on us at all times. We had to take her little sister along as a chaperone. Needless to say they gave their daughter some freedom and got a baby sitter at the same time.
Time flew by so quickly. We brought our popcorn and Kool Aid from home. We all had a great time. Being the gentleman I have always been, I treated her respectfully and tender. She rewarded me with a peck on the cheek when I took her and “whats her name ?” home..
My how times have changed!? ‘ONCE AN OZARK AMERICAN ALWAYS ONE”!
When I was dating my first definite boyfriend we saw Nutty Professor. I probably told my friends all the non-movie details, but what I don’t remember sharing was that after the movie I noticed something white on my date’s black shirt–most likely it was my deodorant because I was wearing a sleeveless shirt. I think I managed to inconspicuously wipe it all off, but I never asked him about it because we never got to that point in the relationship where you can say, “Remember that one time?” and laugh together as a couple.
“What’s this horniness I’m feeling?” I thought, watching a crazed Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory. “Also, this movie’s awful.” It’s possibly the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Even at that adolescent age, I knew Mel had something evil in him.
My high school girlfriend and I ended up walking out after an hour. I’d like to think we walked out because of our discerning taste, but it was more that we needed to go dry-hump in my Corolla. Conspiracy Theory, to this day, remains the only movie I’ve ever walked out of. I still get dry-humped on occasion.
“The Little Mermaid grasped her throat, shocked that the Sea Witch had actually taken her voice. I felt her pain. At last Friday’s dance, J. and I had kissed for real, with tongues, but since then hadn’t even pecked. I assumed you went to second base after first, not the dug out. My hand scuttled once more over the armrest, around the popcorn, and back to my lap. Enough. I had my pride. I stole a last glance at J’s hands, clasped together, definitively, in her lap, and at those lips that reflected with crushing appropriateness the golden ball Ursuala had drawn from Ariel’s throat. But I saved my most desperate gaze for J’s breasts, looming under her sweater like distant hills that seem so close, until you start walking towards them.”
My very first movie date was Shakespeare in Love, during which I got a little too much love from my girlfriend. Pride quickly turned to horror when I realized how huge the stain on my pants was. It was at the Angelika in New York, and as we filed out, older, more cultured people than myself flitted their hands and discussed what they had just seen while I held my backpack over my crotch. It stayed up there all the way home and down the hall past my mom.
On my first movie date, we saw Taps. For my date, military; for me, hotties. Ideal. All I remember, though, is that I was dizzy in love with Timothy Hutton, and that I had to pee. Bad. By the point where the army shows up, I was turning blue. Why didn’t I go? Because peeing is gross! Embarrassing! If Stuart knew I had human bodily functions, he would cease to think of me as a demigoddess. That, and I would interrupt – perhaps forever — the excruciating, invisible-to-the-eye progress of his hand toward my knee. Back at his house, I finally asked for the bathroom. Then we looked at his bar mitzvah album and totally made out. That was the last time I underestimated him.
“Don’t leave now,” *Bill said. “It’s just getting good.” I crossed my legs and squeezed my thighs together to silence my bladder. On the screen, Uma, finding herself in a room alone, snorted some coke.
Then, all hell broke loose. The coke–which turned out to actually be heroin–had Uma writhing on the floor, a trail of blood running down her face and drool forming a milky puddle around her lips. Miraculously, Vincent revived her with a quick burst of adrenaline from a syringe. When she came to, I breathed a sigh of relief and scurried to the bathroom.
Some time later, Bill suffered a similar fate as Uma’s character. Only there was no shot of adrenaline. No one to bring him magically back to life.
It was nothing like the movies at all.
My first movie date was with Ken in 6th grade. We saw “Ghostbusters” and he helped paint my bedroom because we’d just moved. We listened to The Jacksons’ “Can You Feel It” and he drew me a picture of a unicorn. He was very fat. I felt bad for him. He was nice. Plus, he passed me a note in school that read, “Roses are red, violets are blue, roads have curves and so do you,” despite the fact that I was a card carrying member of The Itty Bitty Titty Committee.
Okay, it wasn’t my very first date. But I did meet my husband at the movies, so it was a very first something else. It was 1990. It was “Roger and Me.” My friend Cathy and I had a standing Friday night out because neither of us had boyfriends. We saw the early show and were headed, as usual, to a bar. He was coming in with his friends to the later show. He worked with my friend. She introduced him as someone who obviously couldn’t get laid either. And I thought, possibly lonely and desperate. I like that in a man. As we were walking away, I said to Cathy, “Wouldn’t it be funny if he and I wound up together?” So we did.
Shana and I told our parents we were going to see a movie together. We got dropped off. Bill and Ryan were inside, secretly waiting to meet us. Bill was a hockey player and I liked the nicks and cuts on his hands. Later that year Ryan would French kiss me seven times at a school dance.
We hung out in the carpeted hallway, daring each other to touch the life-size display of Jim Carrey in inappropriate ways. We sat in the theater strategically: boy, girl, boy, girl. When it was done we called my mom from a pay phone and before I left Bill kissed my cheek.
I was a hard-core nail biter in the 8th grade when I took my girlfriend Heather to the movies. Serious biters know that it’s not just the nails that look all fucked up, it’s the whole finger tip. An effective biter gets these flaps of skin that dangle away from the cuticles. If you don’t bite them off right away, they sort of harden and turn into little appendages. Good little scratching appendages. Heather didn’t agree, saying to me after the film, “…making out was good, but you were scratching the back of my neck with something hard and crusty…”
My first movie date was with my first girlfriend, her parents and her little sister to see Supergirl at the cinema in Muirend, about 100 yards inside the Glasgow city limits. I held her hand and she alternately held my hand and twisted my knuckles. In either case I had to remain impassive, since her dad was just two seats away and I was 14. I’m amazed that even though the movie was a shlocky piece of crap that Helen Slater didn’t escape from the wreckage with a glittering career, since she was cute (in a blonde, all-American volleyball girl kind of way) and her kissing was awesome.
In 1983, Todd, an across-the-street neighbor, took me to see The Twilight Zone. Todd’s father drove us to the theater in his large Cadillac with gold plated knobs, a cutting-edge cassette deck, beige leather seats, and power everything. Todd and I sat in the back on opposite sides of the vehicle, staring out the windows and twitching nervously as his father casually flicked cigarette ashes out of his cracked window and lectured us about lawn care and the loose dog terrorizing the neighborhood. I don’t remember the film, but I do remember the strong odor of those Chesterfields mixed with the smell of the car’s leather interior. I remember worrying about whether I’d see the scene in which 3 cast members were killed in a helicopter crash. I remember being nervous until I realized that I was not the least bit interested in Todd.
My first REAL movie date was a few months ago. Pathetic really. I remember I had stolen Sarah Beth’s boyfriend, Teddy. Teddy had cosmic eyes, a certain shade of green not found in paint stores. He smelled kind of funny, like too much of his father’s calonge, stolen from the medicine cabinit perhaps? Or wherever men keep their scents. I don’t know, as I’m a woman. More like a girl. Fifteen in a month. Woo Hoo! But anyways, the movie was Zodiac, which we had snuck into, as fifteen is not eighteen, even though Teddy was sixteen, people mistook me as the older one in the relationship, which was funny. Maybe I could’ve asked for Zodiac instead of ‘The Astronaut Farmer’ and they’d just have slipped me the ticket. He insisted on paying, which I didn’t like. That almost always means that the boy wants you to put out for him. I did not want to put out for Teddy because A) He smelled funny. B) What does he think I am, a whore? & C) I wanted revenge on Sarah Beth, not a macking out session, which is what he most definatly wanted as he offered me tic tacs. We’d eaten at the crappy Italian resturaunt across the street, and I smelled like garlic. I gave him a wicked grin and said ‘No Thank You.’
The movie was so long, and I was so close to Teddy, I could smell the bad on him. It has no description, just ‘BAD. COUGH HACK WEEZE BAAAAAD.’ I kissed him during the part where I thought I was going to pee my pants with fright. But I didn’t and I nearly gagged from intaking some of that crappy man perfume. He seemed satisfied, and I was happy with my story to tell to Katie who has the biggest mouth in school, and is friends with Sarah Beth, so she’d hear about it and maybe STFU in fourth period gym.
Sarah Beth didn’t STFU, only because worse.
And after I broke it off with Teddy he still smelled bad in Science.
My first two movie dates didn’t really count because one was at my cousin’s house and the other was with a “friend” who I had sort of just met and then never saw again. So my first “real” movie date was with my first serious girlfriend, after we had been dating for a solid four months or so. We were going to to see Borat at the mall near her house, but since I was 16 and she was 15 the ticket guy wouldn’t let us in. Neither of us were familiar with that theater so we didn’t try to buy a ticket for a different movie and sneak in—also, I was too embarrassed at having been turned down and didn’t want to face the ticket guy again.
So after wandering around the mall for a while and buying a Bonnie and Clyde DVD at some store, one of us remembered that the Internet cafe in the mall had PS2s and Xboxes, which could be used as DVD players. So we rented a TV and console for an hour and watched Bonnie and Clyde get killed. Fortunately we were comfortable enough with each other by then that it was funny rather than awkward that we were watching a movie next to people playing Halo and World of Warcraft.
Wow. My first movie date? Total fail. It was with this guy that I didn’t really like but who was kind of a friend, so I went with him anyway… and invited my friend and her friend and their boyfriends and some more friends so it wouldn’t be as awkward. Well, I looked up the movie times and saw 11:45, so I told them we’d meet there at 11:15. We met up with everyone and went up to the ticket guy asking for “Sweeney Todd at 11:45″ and he said, “you mean 12:45?” So embarrassing! We sat around in the movie theater for an hour, dipping in on other movies (which were bad) until our movie started.
On top of that, my date gets queasy at the sight of gore. (I didn’t know! I would’ve picked another movie if he told me.) He almost threw up once we got out and had to sit down on a bench for a while. It was pretty bad. Lol.
My first movie date was awful. I was dating this guy i didn’t like and we saw the good shepherd. Since he only speaks a little english he didn’t understand sqwat and we left after an hour. We hadn’t kissed but we did hold hands.
We broke up after 2 weeks.
The funny part is that about 6 months later i ended up dating his bestfriend with whom i am still currently with and it’s been a year and a half. My ex is one of my best friends now and we never talk about that day.