Jinxed Weekend? (sometimes you've just gotta laugh)

Friday nights we often eat out at a restaurant. This particular Friday, Cathy was in a more "American" mood so we went to a place that is kind of an old-favorite-you-always-forget-to-go-to, the Delta Cafe on 41st Street. Delta Cafe has what you might call Southern or Country food. It's the kind of place where whatever it is, you probably are going to eat it chicken fried, and mac & cheese is considered a vegetable. Mmmm-MMM!!! So we got there and it was fairly crowded... it was a Friday night, after all. There was no wait for a table, but there weren't that many tables empty. Just enough of a crowd to let you know the food's going to be yummy, but not so much that you have to stand in the lobby for 45 minutes (a real problem at many restaurants in Tulsa!) So anyway, we get seated, make our selections from the menu, and place our order, and wait for our food to come.

And we wait.

And wait.

And wait.

We get our drinks and our bread rolls and Cathy gets her little side salad, but nothing more. One time our waitress comes by and tells us she's checking into our food, but then we never hear from her again. We wait until our patience is wearing thin and we're about ready to walk out and go eat somewhere else, and Cathy collars the hostess and says, can you find out what's going on with our food? And then finally the waitress brings our order out, with the apology "They lost your ticket." LOST our TICKET? We had been sitting there at least 45 minutes with a wiggly 7-year-old, and they're losing our order. We ate and blew out of there. The food tasted good, but the service definitely left a bad taste in our mouths. Plus, they basically burned our Friday night... for a family with two kids, there was no time after that to do much of anything but go home and go to bed.

So Saturday night we decided to do something else fun. We headed over to the Cinemark dollar theater to see Enchanted, which Mikey had been wanting to see since it came out in December. Unfortunately it was sold out, so we opted for our second choice, The Water Horse. We've been wanting to see it too... with a few minor exceptions, we've loved everything we've seen with Walden Media's name on it. So we get into the theater, and you know how they always show those slideshows with movie facts and ads for Coca-Cola and stuff before the movie? With music playing? No music this time. Actually, there was a sound of light static instead. That should have been our first sign of trouble... that and the fact that someone had obviously tagged the screen at some point; there a bright spot in the same shape as the tag where the theater had scrubbed it off.

We had about a 20-minute wait before the movie started, which was fine... it was because we were going to see a later movie than we had intended. Cathy went to get a drink from the snack bar, and Mikey and I had some kind of fun moments listening to the young lady right behind us calling friends on her cell phone to lament that it was her 25th birthday (OH NOOOO! LIFE HAS ENDED!! NO TWENTY-FIVE!!! ANYTHING BUT TWENTY-FIVE!!!! Actually, to be fair, I remember as a teenager listening to Randy Stonehill's song "Turnin' Thirty" and wondering what it would be like in the far-off year of 2000 when I turned thirty. These days Randy is singing a song called "We Were All So Young." I'm singing it too... hehe)

So finally the previews started, and then about eight or so minutes later, the movie. Unfortunately for us, right when the actual movie started, some people sat down behind us breathing beer fumes. After an hour or so their stinky beer breath seemed to clear, so eventually it wasn't too bad. I was waiting for Mikey to ask what it was so I could loudly say "That's the smell of beer, Mikey. Someone drank a lot of beer before they came to the movies."

What do you mean, passive-aggressive? ;)

Cathy never mentioned the beer, but I think the heavy cologne someone in front of us was wearing made her sneeze. Why do people bathe in that stuff and then go out in public? Sheesh.

The opening scenes of The Water Horse are beautiful shots of Scotland... beautiful, that is, except for the shadow of a wire or something that was over the top right-hand corner of the picture. Nothing was obscured by it, but it certainly was distracting, especially in long shots with lots of sky in them (like all the opening shots of the movie!) Someone must have complained; after about 10-15 minutes of that nonsense, the projector briefly ground to a halt (with no explanation from the staff) and when it came back on, the shadow was gone.

We thoroughly enjoyed the movie, all the way to the story's climax when the water horse is on the verge of escape and the boy tells him he's his best friend ever, and then the film melts and the screen goes white. Oh, it didn't happen that way when you saw it? Well, it did when we did. Just like in The Muppet Movie, except in our movie it wasn't supposed to happen. That was when about 1/3 of the audience walked out. But we were patient, because we wanted to see the end of the movie, and maybe 8-10 minutes later, it came back on YAY! So we got to see that the boy had escaped and the creature had... well, I won't tell you. Maybe you will want to see the movie sometime. Suffice it to say that the scene ended happily and then it was a beatiful, clear morning in Scotland, and the projector jammed AGAIN. And the film melted, just like in The Muppet Movie. Except, did I mention that in this case it wasn't supposed to happen?

By this time Hannah, who had spent the entire movie quietly sleeping in my arms (except for one time when someone on-screen screamed and she jumped, but that only happened once), started to get hungry and restless, so while we were waiting for the film to get repaired again, I stuck a bottle in her mouth and she got to work on it. Someone from the theater came in and shouted from the back that we could all get free passes for another movie, so we wound up leaving and getting that. They gave us 4 passes to make up for the three that we had purchased. Because, you know, after an awful moviegoing experience, you REALLY want to go see a movie at THAT theater again! We waited in line for our passes, and then I let Mikey play a few video games (no, Mikey, the motorboat-racing one, NOT the one where you shoot people and their chests explode!) while Cathy finished feeding Hannah. So if you count us having to wait 20 extra minutes for a movie when the one we planned on was sold out, then the waits to fix the film when it got messed up, then the wait in line to get our consolation prize, then waiting for Hannah to finish eating, we had expected to get home by about 9:30pm and it was more like 11. If we had known, we would have probably rented something instead. Good thing it wasn't a school night! Unfortunately it was a church night and we have to be at the church at 7:30am for choir sound check before the early service, so we were all a little bit listless in the morning.

BUT: the jinx was lifted the next day when we grabbed my dad and used our passes to go see Enchanted, which we all enjoyed very much (Mikey liked all of it except the kissy parts). And at my house, we think "Happy Working Song" should have won the Oscar for best song. But that's just us.

But we really would like to see the end of The Water Horse. We really liked the part of it that we did get to see.