Once, I was early for something. Wouldn’t happen these days, I have learned the error of my ways, and now go to great lengths to be perfectly on time. I fail a lot. Anyway, I was meant to be going to the cinema with a friend, who was also early, so we decided to hang out in the café/bar/garish nightclub bit common to many cinemas. Where we found this.
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| The holy grail - a free bar |
A bar filled with glasses of free (we assumed) wine.
Being students at the time, we were both poor yet had a penchant for what we perceived to be the finer things in life (read: booze). There weren’t many people around, but a couple had sauntered over and helped themselves so, in a moment of uncharacteristic brazenness, we decided to do the same.
We found a dim corner and nonchalantly sat, covertly sipping our spoils, when a guy wearing an ID badge appeared and made a beeline for our table. I was suddenly gripped with the feeling I usually get every time I pass through airport security checks – sheer and utter panic. Seriously, I’ve never attempted to even smuggle so much as a tweezers, or carry on a single millilitre over the 100ml allowed, but every time I hear a metal detector beep, I break into a cold sweat. This is a direct result of an overactive imagination fuelled by a childhood of “inspirational” movies about people who somehow overcome gross injustices, like being inexplicably framed for crimes they didn’t commit. Unfortunately, I ain’t no Hurricane. (Though I do hope to one day become Champion of the World).
Anyway, the guy introduces himself as a reporter for a well-known newspaper and proceeds to ask us what we thought of the movie. The movie we’d just seen. The movie we’d evidently crashed the after-party for. We looked about. The only people there were a handful of 40-somethings and their under-5 kids. This didn’t look like any kind of movie premiere I could ever have imagined (have I mentioned it was about 6pm on a rainy Tuesday? And that I’m a twotime silver medallist in the Imagination Olympics? True story.) Though sure enough there, standing in the corner, was the star of the movie, trying to convince his kids to stop swinging out of the plastic chairs.
My friend and I, having known each other sufficient years to hone such skills, quickly had a telepathic conversation. Both realising what a tough job this reporter guy would have in making this movie "premiere" seem like a sufficiently trendy social event that might convince the public to go see the movie, we agreed to play along with the “interview” as it were, charitably lending the considerable weight of our collective coolness (read: marketable target youth demographic). To anyone who may interpret our charity as a blatant soul-for-booze exchange, please don’t pretend like you haven’t done the same thing at one time or another. At least we gave the guy our real names.
The interview went something like this:
Reporter: “So, what did you think of the movie?”
Me: “Eh, great. Really, eh…”
Friend: “Gripping”
Me: “Yeah, gripping. You’d have to say it was gripping alright”
Reporter: “Great. What parts did you find particularly gripping?”
Realising that we knew neither the plotline nor even the title of the movie in question, we decided to come clean and admit to the guy that we had no idea what was going on, we hadn’t seen any movie, we meant no disrespect to its venerable star or the Irish film industry at large, that we could probably scrape together the cash to pay for our ill-gotten gains but if not it was ok because we could wash dishes, work the tills or definitely give popcorn-slinging a go, and I could possibly even clean their milkshake machine, if they had a Phillips-head screwdriver handy.
As a policy, honesty has seldom worked in my favour, but this time, inexplicably, it did. The dude just chuckled, took our picture and the following week we were featured in the What’s Hot section.
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| This is how I always look in photos. My face is allergic to cameras. |
Sometimes the world makes very little sense to me.
