Carrie made a discovery in the paper recently. A local theater was offering a free showing of WALL-E on Saturday morning for special needs kids and their families. My first thought was, “Wow, that’s great. Here’s a place that is reaching out to our community.” My second thought was, “What’s the catch? What do they want from me?” Carrie doesn’t approve too much when I have negative thoughts like that. My third thought was, “Boy, I could sure use a sandwich.” That final thought just sort of jumped right in, it being near dinnertime on Friday when Carrie told me about the show.

Despite my concerns, we gave it a try. I figured that perhaps the theater’s angle (if they had one other than pure altruism) was that they could recoup some money in food, since it was one of those restaurant-theater sort of setups, where every seat has a table in front and waiters scurry about in the dark during the entire feature offering you food that other people ordered.

Here we go. I don’t really get into the combination restaurant-theater deal for several reasons. First, I like food. Not that their food is bad – I just like to pay attention to my food, especially if I’m eating out, a rare occasion that deserves special attention. On the other hand, I don’t go as far as a friend of mine who closes his eyes and tilts his head back when he eats, giving the appearance that he’s in some sort of trance or he’s communing with some, I don’t know, communing thing. (I do sometimes close my eyes when drinking a good dark ale, though). I’ve eaten dinner in front of the TV many times, and I’ve been disappointed many times to look down at my awesome dinner only to discover that it disappeared already, apparently shoveled in with reckless abandon during a massive car chase / explosion / shoot-out on the tube. So that’s one reason I don’t go for the movie/restaurant combo – the movie distracts me from the food.

My next reason is very closely related to the first. I’m basically cheap. There, I said it. I’d rather eat at a real restaurant for the money.

Third, if I somehow find the time to go out to a movie and restaurant, I want to spread that out as long as possible. If you do the combo routine, the whole event is over in less than two hours. If you split it up, you can squeeze out a couple more hours, especially if you are fortunate enough to get really bad service.

Finally, things that do two things at once don’t typically do either one as well. Like say a TV with a built-in DVD player. Or Bo Jackson. No, he was pretty good at a bunch of things. Scratch Bo Jackson. How about an iPhone? Maybe not an iPhone – I don’t have one so I can’t really say, but I heard they’re not as good as regular phones for your straightforward phone type phoning. But they do MP3 and organization and user interface stuff pretty well, don’t they? So my final reason may not really be valid… forget that I brought that one up.

Segue complete. Back on topic.

We arrived 30 minutes early and there was already a small line forming. I could see other families like ours in line and it warmed my heart. We sailed past the lady at the ticket counter and I figured that we were home free. Er… not quite.

Nobody kept track of how many people went in there, and there were no seats available (unless you counted the one quarter of the theater that people had reserved). Some of the patrons were paying customers. I heard the manager say, “I’m sorry. It’s first-come, first-serve. There’s nothing I can do.”

That was a lie. There was nothing he would do. I knew that there was another showing in just a few minutes on another screen. Only the current showing was advertised as free, but there was no way that we were going to build Isabella up for 2 hours, drive across town, wait in line, then tell her sorry but that movie was filled up. And I wasn’t about to give money to these people who just baited us and switched us and kicked me in the McNuggets (figuratively). So we calmly left the growing mob at the back of that theater room and moseyed on down to the other screen and found a seat.

I had a good bit of righteous indignation, though I don’t know for sure if the manager was being deceitful or just incompetent. Maybe neither because a few minutes later we saw a few stragglers from the other overflow crowd wander into our showing. I felt bad that I hadn’t announced it to the other families (and I still do); I was just too focused on getting Isabella into the show.

Despite our bravado at changing shows, I still kept thinking that some theater worker would discover us and boot us out. I had my vitriolic speech locked and loaded, but thankfully I didn’t need to use it – vitriol gets me too excited.

Isabella sat mostly quietly through three-fourths of the movie. (CARRIE EDITORIAL COMMENT: she talked to me for half of the movie, so she was only quiet a fourth of the time). I began to worry that she wasn’t understanding what was going on, so I explained something to her during a particularly confusing part. That opened the floodgates. “Why did he do that?” “Is he a bad guy?” “Which one is the good guy?” Etc. I was glad she wanted to understand what was going on, but the varying volume of the movie made things awkward. She spoke at a constant volume, so I couldn’t hear her some of the time and the entire theater could the rest of the time. When I answered her, I got close to her ear so I wouldn’t disturb the others. I may not have disturbed the others, but I definitely disturbed Isabella because half of the time she put her hands over her ears and leaned away from me when I replied. Afterwards, she’d repeat her question because for some reason she hadn’t heard my reply.

So, it was pretty exciting, as usual. I was almost royally peeved, but it turned out okay (Listen up, business owners! Don’t offer a service if you can’t deliver! ) It wasn’t my favorite movie, but it was still cute. I think Isabella would need to watch it several more times before she would fully understand it, preferably with a remote control in her hand so she could pause and rewind. Her TV watching technique is a blog in itself, so more on that later!