But dammit, we wanted date night.
So one night, we had a coupon and some pizza bites and decided to make it a double feature, and we rented Somersby with Richard Gere and Jodie Foster and Wild at Heart with Marisa Tomei and Christian Slater, and I hope you'll all forgive me for the spoilers when I tell you the hero dies at the end of both movies.
And that we only wished somebody had spoiled the movies for US.
But they didn't. So there we were, FETAL on the couch at the end of Wild at Heart, wailing, "Wait a minute, he fuckin' DIES???" and Mate says to me, "Great date night, honey. We should do this again." And then we were laughing and sobbing at the same time and the couch was a mess, and it was another ten months and a new baby before we had enough money to hit the movies one more time.
Now flashforward thirty years.
And Mate and I have made a date night appointment to see A Man Called Otto. Now I'm not going to spoil the movie for you--I will say that it was ultimately WAY more uplifting than either Wild at Heart or Somersby, and that there's a lot of suicidal ideation in it, so if that's a trigger warning, be aware.
But I will tell you that at the most emotional point in the movie, I was sobbing, and Mate's shoulders were shaking, and we were two of four people in the theater ugly crying all over ourselves and I turned to Mate and said, "Date night hasn't been this much fun since Somersby and Wild at Heart, and suddenly we were laughing and bazooka wookie snot-sobbing all over each other, and the intervening thirty years between the set up and delivery of that joke only made it richer.
There's got to be some benefits to aging after all, right?