Apologies to my loyal readers (all 5 of you) for the long delay between posts. I’ve spent the last 3 weeks working on my Ukraine report, a truly interesting country fraught with political turmoil and courage…just ask me anything you want to know!

Now back to some of my aimless observations...

I love movies and have more than 13 movie screens within a two block radius.  So… one Monday afternoon on the spur of the moment I went to a 1:30 showing of “The Big Short”. I always leave lots of time just in case the line is around the block (at 1:30 pm, what’s wrong with me?!). I wound up carefully choosing just the right seat in a very large and very empty movie theater at least a half hour before the gazillion trailers and previews were set to begin. At the start of the feature there were approximately 25 people in the entire theater, 3 of them scattered throughout my row. Amazingly a woman came in 10 minutes after the movie started and stopped to ask if the seat next to me was taken-no it wasn’t but neither were the other 400 empty seats in the theater(I didn’t say that out loud!). Sure enough she sat down right next to me and immediately started chomping away on a jumbo box of popcorn, after finishing the popcorn and annoying me for what seemed like forever, she proceeded to open and crunch away on a large box of M&M’s, THEN she  unwrapped and happily sucked on a lollipop (a grown woman, seriously, you can’t make this stuff up!). I found myself becoming fascinated by her sugar tolerance not focused on the movie.

OK, I know people are allowed to sit wherever they want and eat whatever they choose and you are probably asking yourself why didn’t I just get up and move… I have no idea!  Now I have to go back and see the movie when I can actually hear the dialogue!

Lessons learned:

1. move immediately if an annoying eater sits down next to me
2. bring extra coats and hats to leave on every seat in the immediate vicinity
3. or wait for the movie to come out on Netflix!