A night at the cheap theater

Will someone please tell me where the weekend went?

One thing I remember, I went with my mom to see "Water For Elephants." That is a bad title, you know? I know it was the book title but it is still bad. I keep wanting to say, "Like Water For Elephants." As in: "Like Water For Chocolate," another ridiculous title. People kept explaining to me the meaning behind "Like Water For Chocolate" and I never could remember it and I still think it was dumb.

But anyway, "Water For Elephants" was about a Depression-era circus. This guy is trained as a veterinarian and he joins the circus and promptly falls in love with the ringmaster's wife.

There were good scenes of trains and animals. They had the cutest elephant and one scene that I loved had them putting up the big top. You could tell they knew how good a scene that was.

Reese Witherspoon looked kind of trashy all the way through but I think she was supposed to be that way. She was a circus babe!

One thing about "Water For Elephants," it did not know when to end. There was one ending and then another and then another. Personally I think it should have ended the first time around, when the hero and heroine have escaped, jumped out of the train or something, I forget what happened. My mind is too full of Leonard Pennario. Want to hear what happened to him in the spring of 1951? I can tell you. Name a year, any year.

I am loving this cool weather. All day it was quiet and I could work. Take your summer! I do not miss it.

Where was I?

Oh, right, the endings for "Water For Elephants." It ended once and then it ended twice. Sort of like the end to Beethoven's Fifth. ...



You are going, OK, Ludwig, enough chords, wrap it up. Time for the artist to lift his brush, as Howard likes to say.

But all in all the movie was fine and my mother liked it which is good enough for me.

My mom and I have been going to the movies once a week but I cannot help thinking, pretty soon we are going to run up against a week with no good movies. There are not many good movies out there and very few you can take your mother to, that is for sure. It is living on the brink, trying to go to the movies once a week.

Next week, what? It adds to the challenge that we go only to the cheap theater, i.e., Movieland 8.

Ha, ha! That reminds me! Before the movie we went to the Wehrle Restaurant. And the waitress there, we mention we are going to the movies and we need the check. She brings and asks what movie we're seeing. And we tell her.

"Ah," she says. "The cheap theater!"

We all call it that here in Buffalo! They can go ahead and call themselves, ahem, Movieland 8. But it is the cheap theater. Two nights a week, Wednesday and Friday, admission is only $2.

That is what movies were when I was a kid!

Amazing, that one thing did not change.