Do Your Worst

We went to see The Aviator and it was the most suffering that I’ve gone through in a long time. Or ever.

It was a weekend matinee, and the theater was about half full, so my mind began to wriggle out of control right away when a woman sat down right next to me. The row in front of us was clear, and most of the row behind us, and five seats on either side of us. She was late-middle-aged, with a sickly bleached pageboy cut and horn-rimmed glasses. Her entire head had been dunked in what I immediately recognized as a cheap cologne called “Anaïs Anaïs”, which my mother used to wear when I was little and which my sister used to derisively call “Flowers Galore” behind her back. It gave me an instant migraine.

Flowers Galore’s next offense was her colossal ass, which leaked underneath the armrest and jutted into my thigh. Then she draped her hamhock-arm over the armrest we shared, which also touched me. Once she was snuggled up to me real nice, she hauled her purse up to her lap and began rifling and jangling through it and whipping out miscellany. the purse was the size of a newborn calf, and for awhile, I thought that must be what was shoved up against my thigh, until she put it back down and I could still feel something on my… oh, the horror. And she kept the purse-rummaging up after the movie had started–it was usually lipstick, to apply anew every half-hour, or her cellphone, to check what time it was. The cellphone was really bright and lit up her whole face. I guess that’s why she needed the lipstick.

Then the two girls behind me started their stage-whispering. When Gwen Stefani showed up, they both exclaimed “Gwen Stefani!” to each other, along with like four other people in the theater. One girl asked the other if she knew who Cate Blanchett was supposed to be. They chattered about which actresses had pretty dresses. It was a regular round-table discussion.

Meanwhile, I was watching Leonardo DiCaprio go incrementally crazier and crazier, and he was giving me permission to do the same. “Come in with the milk,” he repeated, and my brain repeated creative and profane threats. I can do that if he can. Check this out. Every new Crazy thing he did seemed more appealing than the last. Hey, YOU don’t like touching bathroom doorknobs after you’ve washed your hands? Oh my god, me NEITHER. Dude, I wish I could get away with ordering twelve peas with my steak, or cookies with ten chocolate chips apiece. I’m gonna be a billionaire just so i can do that. Imagine how great that would feel, to not have to put up with imperfection anymore!

The movie was about halfway through and I was in the supreme throes of crazy when Flowers Galore decided to start talking to the characters. If Howard Hughes ever did anything that could be construed as nutty, Flowers would criticize him. “Oh, boy, here we go again, Howard,” she told him, exasperated. When he got in his new superfast plane, she sniped, “You’re just going to crash it.” Why does Howard have to give her so much trouble?

The girls were also very reactionary. “Ewwww! Uhhhhh!” they cried in harmony when Howard was served his trout with the head still attached. When the camera cut to his living room all littered with tissues, one said to the other, “Would you look at that?” We’re all looking at it. We paid money to come here and look at it. I found the courage to wheel around a couple times and glare at them, but they didn’t notice—they were busy. Looking at it.

Tragically, both Flowers Galore and the Whisper Twins were on my side and my boyfriend was missing all of this. I would poke him and nod in their directions, not believing their gall for saying it or my good fortune for witnessing such gall, but Sean would just blink. “What?” It was all I could not to take notes.

Flowers never stopped conversing with the movie and rooting through her cauldron-purse at intervals. I managed an audible “Oh, Jesus,” but that was the best I could do; there was no way I could address her in the state I was in without coming completely unhinged. The movie focused again and again on Howard Hughes’ germ obsession, and my stomach rolled down a spiral-slide when I thought of all the diseases on this lady’s butt, rubbing against my jeans. She goes to the bathroom, then touches her pants to pull them back up. THEN washes her hands. Perhaps I’ll throw these jeans away.

So I just sat there, vibrating in agony, committing each patron’s retarded exhortations to memory. People like these shouldn’t be allowed in movie theaters. You should need a license; they should make you take a class on how to shut the hell up before they let you in. When I’m rich, I’m going to buy my own private movie theater and nobody will be allowed in but me. To calm down, I cracked all my knuckles in order, then reached over and cracked all of Sean’s. OK, maybe Sean can come in.

I’m not a hand-washer, but by the end of the film, I was jonesing to take a cue from Howard and go scrub my entire body until I bled. No one told me this was a three-hour movie, for godsake. And they stretched the ending out for an extra 20 minutes, so you knew the movie was allllmost over, but only after they let Leonardo say, “The wave of the future” about eighty times did the credits roll. As a finale, Flowers rose from her seat, turned, and clocked me right in the nose with her germy, velour-upholstered butt.

I’m seriously only renting the major Hollywood flicks from now on, or going during the day when the theaters are empty. People are jackals. It’s just too hard.