ostriches and Dick

8/15/99

I forgot this incident from yesterday: as John and I were driving home from Savannah, we saw a family by the side of the road, three or four kids and an adult or two, and a dog running around in the grass. Smoke poured from the hood of their mini-van, and the mother frantically waved her arms at the passing cars. I slowed the car down and pulled onto the shoulder. A teenaged boy ran to the window and shouted, “Do you have a fire extinguisher?” We told him we’d call 911 from the next exit.

So we called from a pay phone, then John went into the gas station to pee, with orders to buy me chewy Spree candy if he could find some. Instead of waiting in the car like I was supposed to, I ran over to the field next to the gas station, where a herd of goats were penned with a pair of ostriches and a couple of geese. I had half of a baguette and I fed bits of it to the goats, who took it from my hands like they were used to being fed by strangers. The ostriches grabbed for the bread rudely, sometimes snapping it from the mouths of the goats if the bites were big enough.

One of them got my hand. No shit. I have a bruise on my hand where an ostrich bit me. After that, I tossed a piece of bread over the ostriches’ heads and then furtively slipped a few chunks to the more polite goats. Sometimes the ostriches caught the bread before it even hit the ground. Those are some mean fucking birds.

We drove to Macon tonight to see Dick. When we got to the theater, the movie wasn’t on the board above the ticket counter. We asked the attendant and she said yes, it was showing, but in the same theater as The Haunting, so it wasn’t on the board. Can you see where this is going?

We bought tickets for the 9:55 showing and then we had about four hours to kill, so we went to PetSmart and bought some catnip, hung around in Media Play for a while and then got dinner. Then we wandered around Big K Mart. Big exciting evening in Georgia, huh? We got to the theater and sat through all those tacky advertisements before the movie. When the previews started, we realized we were the only people in the room. Nobody else showed up.

The movie wasn’t on the damn board, so nobody knew it was playing. We watched it all by ourselves. Talking out loud, laughing as loud as we could. At one point I jumped to my feet and hopped around in front of my chair, just because I could.

We were actually a little annoyed that we were alone in the theater. This is opening weekend for the movie, and it was great. This was really a good movie. There were problems with the release, coming late in the summer, after a lot of other big movies, and it was marketed strangely. The trailers and publicity made it seem like a teenagers’ flick, but the jokes and such were definitely aimed at an adult audience. Best for people who remember the seventies, preferably those who’ve seen All the President’s Men. In fact, a lot of humor is lost if you haven’t seen that. I explained more than a few of those references to John.

But the movie was very cute, and quite funny. There weren’t too many “Dick” jokes. I was afraid “Dick” jokes would be too prevalent, but there were only a few, and one of them was so hilarious that it was totally worth the seven bucks just for that.

One of the two characters, the one played by Kirsten Dunst, is named Betsy. There’s one place in the movie where a teacher uses her last name, and we thought it was Jones. No kidding—he almost said “Betsy Jones.” In the end, it turned out her name was Betsy Jobs, not Jones. Too bad.

So that’s about it for today. Go see Dick, and watch out for ostriches. Learn from my example.