It's Very Cool to be a Mom to Boys

Another weekend that I was able to plan a very cool adventure for the boys; James had to work on his thesis, but he said this was my thing anyways. I took the boys to see a free special preview screening of Speed Racer! Did I mention it was free...it's always the best part! A side note: last night I bought Noah another Phineas and Ferb t-shirt and the salesgirl at the Disney Store gave me a handful of P & F stickers -- free again. Yay!

Back to the movie adventure. Earlier in the week as Jonah and I were doing our usual stuff hanging out at home I caught the end of a tv announcment about the free screening. The first 100 people who line up at the local mult-plex by 9 a.m. Saturday... I felt we had a good chance. There's roughly 30,000 residents; what are the chances of a large crowd going to this so early and on a Saturday?! We left the house at 8 a.m. -- milk in spill-proof cups, two bowls of cereal, a plastic bag full of snacks, and a thermos of tea (for me).

We were the second family to get to the theater...strangely there was only a cleaning staff there and one girl sitting in the box office area, but I don't think she had a clear idea of what was going on...a few moments later a couple guys in suits walked by and said to just form a line. Soon two more families arrived; now there was a total of 4 parents/guardians and about 10 kids...all just standing around. 15 minutes into this a man from the local tv station arrived with passes. He said some "official" mumbo-jumbo about how many seats were in the theater, that each pass admits two, yadda, yadda, yadda...looking around, at this point there was less than 20 people; I was pretty confident that we would all get in.

At 9 a.m. we got our passes. What none of us were told was the movie was going to be shown at 10 a.m.!!! More waiting...by this time I am drinking my tea and we had finished the two Pop Tarts I brought from home. A mom in front of me turns around and says "why didn't I think of that?" Since we had our pass, I took the boys for a walk through the Mervyn's, which was open early for one of its sales. When we returned to the line it looked like maybe 50 people were there. Before entering the theater we were told "officially" no cell phones would be allowed; the guys in suits were apparantly from Warner Bros. (I guess wearing a suit on a Saturday morning makes them more official. To me they just looked uncomfortable -- probably because it's Saturday morning!) So one of them give the "official" schpeel about this being a special preview screening and the movie's release will be Friday....blah, blah, blah. All right, I know there are people out there who have these high-tech gadgets that can record a movie in a theater, but looking around, this is a group of parents with kids probably no older than age 9...who would care about recording this movie to post on the Internet?




It was a fantastic movie! The boys loved it.

I have always been a fan of the Speed Racer cartoon. In fact, about two years ago, at a local car wash cashier/waiting area I saw a die cast Mach 5, even though it cost nearly twice as much as a Hot Wheels car, I bought it for Noah. It is so cool!

Final thought: This is just the second time I've gone to a movie theater since Noah was born and both times it's been a car-related movie; Cars (June 2005) and now Speed Racer with both my boys. Very cool!