Cowboys in the Mist

On Saturday night, I went to see BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN at the only place in town that it was playing: the Midtown Art Cinema. It was, of course, completely sold out for each and every showing, and we had to wait outside in the drizzly, frozen rain for about 30 minutes in line just to catch our 10:35 showing. All I have to say about the film itself is: any awards it gets, it totally deserves. If you go, bring tissues.

Being that the movie was preaching to the choir in this area of town, I'll be interested to see it again when it comes to Larryville in a week or so. If you haven't been reading my blog very long, I'll refer you to last year's entry, "Me thankful? F**k off!" once again for a review of local reactions to cinematic cornholing. I don't think I can do it justice, but I love to see those 'necks squirm.

As for the previous night's screening, I stumbled upon a new favorite audience-wide reaction: a multitude of gag sounds when seeing raw meat. My guess is that about half of the audience were vegetarians of some sort... I said VEGEtarians, not VAGItarians... yes, there were a handful of lesbians in attendance, but the overwhelming majority of the gag sounds were male.

My guess is those sounds came from the bird-chested indie rocker gay boys and not the muscular preppy jock types. There was also the awesome catty arguements overheard while waiting for the film to start. The best one came from the row in front of me, where about 7 khaki-clad "all-American" passers were seated next to 2 scrawny indie boys... all of them were gay, that wasn't in question... but was in question was if they were all together, which I soon discovered they weren't.

The 2 indie boys decided to drain the lizard before the movie began and thought they could save their seats (chairs, you perv) by draping their scarves over them. No sooner had they walked away, but another of the jock boys waiting for an open seat and watching the whole thing simply lifts the closest scarf off the seat and tosses it over onto the other scarfed seat with a kind of arrogant disdain.

That's when all of his friends started to berate him, telling him it was so "uncool" of him and that those other guys were just going to the bathroom and were trying to save their seats. They tried to get their own friend to move to a different seat and he simply refused, over and over, stating that you can't save seats with a scarf, blah blah blah. His own buddies were really upset and about to force him to move to save their own embarrassment, when the seat-stealer finally trumped the whole argument with, "Besides, it was a striped scarf." At that point, they all calmed down and agreed that he did the right thing then.

I don't get enough of this kind of fun banter in my daily life anymore.