I tried to take my daughter to the movies this summer. Twice I failed. Yesterday, I succeeded.
It’s getting hot here in South Carolina, so daytime romps at the local parks don’t make much sense. We’ve been wearing the local libraries out. A $2 showing of Space Jam on Tuesday was just what the summer doctor ordered.
We showed up, and I immediately knew there was trouble. I didn’t have my credit card with me. A rookie mistake. I had just started using my Apple Pay wallet and figured we would be okay with the state of the movie theater industry. I was wrong. The show times indicated they would also be screening Space Jam the next day. I apologized to my daughter, and we went home.
We showed up early the next day, and there was pandemonium. There were only fifteen minutes until show time, and the power was off in the entire movie theater. It came on two minutes later, but the credit card readers hadn’t fully booted up when the power crashed. The lady in front of me (in a room full of waiting customers) indicated the power had crashed four times in the last thirty minutes. So I made an executive decision. If we left at that moment, we could get to the next closest Regal Theater by 11:35am, just five minutes late. I rushed my daughter to the car and flew up the highway.
The theater was eerily silent when we arrived. It took me just ten seconds to see why. Space Jam had started at 11am at this new theater, rather than at 11:30am. They wouldn’t sell us tickets. We were nearly forty minutes late. No movies again.
So this Tuesday, I tried to head off trouble at the pass. I picked a movie screening at the larger Greenville theater. It was further away but a less likely candidate for power failure. I ordered our tickets through an app. Score. We got to the theater with fifteen minutes to spare and ordered our concessions through the app. The movie, Sing, was heavy on music, and my daughter probably dug it more than she would have dug Space Jam.
“We did it!” my daughter said as she rammed another handful of popcorn into her mouth.