Dinner and a Movie – the time
tested and perhaps hallowed activities in which a pair of individuals most
often engage in on a first date. Who am
I to mess with tradition?
It was the summer of
2008. It seems like a lifetime ago. My recollection of time is most clearly
defined by the movies that are released on a yearly basis, so here is what I
recall of that year: worldwide audiences were thrilling to the exploits of a
sober Robert Downey, Jr. in a robotic suit of armor. A creaky, weathered Harrison Ford decided to
crack his whip and don his famous fedora once more. Heath Ledger wore make-up and licked his lips
a lot while Christian Bale growled at him.
And a lonely, hopelessly romantic robot cleaned up the earth while
kicking out the jams of “Hello Dolly.”
I’m sure a million things rush
through the mind of the average female when she agrees to go out on a date with
a guy. I present, for your
consideration, the thoughts of the female (Specimen 1), and the male (Specimen
2):
Specimen 1: “Oh my gosh, I
can’t believe he asked me out! What am I going to wear? How should I do my
hair? How much make-up should I wear? I
wonder if he’ll try to kiss me. Should I
let him kiss me? I’m going on a diet for the next three days. “ … and so forth.
Specimen 2: “Well, I guess
we’ll go eat some food and go see a movie.”
Now this breakdown of the
male thought processes doesn’t mean we don’t care. It just means we are very, very simple
creatures. In fact, I cared very much
about this first date, considering I had known this girl for years and this was
my attempt to move out of the nebulous “friend zone” with her and perhaps on to
something more. My real point of
deliberation came when I had to decide, “Which movie are we going to watch?”
There is never any shortage
of date movie film fodder to engage in at your local theater. It is a safe bet that on any given Friday
night you can religiously turn to J. Lo, Jennifer Aniston and many other titans
of the “romantic comedy” genre to provide you with a way to kill 90 minutes
with a companion. But I wanted to take
my date to something special. Something
with heart. So I decided to forego any
chick flick or superhero movie (I’d already seen The Dark Knight five times anyway.)
I chose to take her to see Wall-E.
I had already seen
Disney/Pixar’s latest animated film once that summer, but something about it
resonated with me. Maybe it was the
robots. Maybe it was the
spaceships. Or maybe it was the very
simple love story at the center of it all.
It made me think about that special girl who had agreed to go out with
me. She was still going out with me,
right? Check my phone. Ok, no messages telling me it was all a prank, or that
she spontaneously feels extreme repulsion when she thinks of me. It was still on.
So the Friday night finally
came. I picked her up at her apartment and we set out for some dinner. I casually noted the shoes she was
wearing. Brief digression – perhaps the
best advice my sister ever gave me was to check out a girl’s shoes when going
on a first date. According to my sister,
the nicer a girls shoes, the higher the probability that she is really into
you. And my date was at this moment
wearing red high heels. I deposited this
bit of information into my sister’s “foot apparel to flirtatiousness”
mathematical equation and after mild deliberation determined that this girl
really did like me. Wow. Suddenly I didn’t feel like eating my chinese
food. My stomach was feeling funny again.
After our meal we headed to
the movie theater. We got our tickets, went
inside, and were soon seated in the intimidatingly permissive semi-darkness
within. In an act of sheer, unbridled
audacity, I lifted up the armrest so that there was nothing separating us.
“These things are for
strangers,” I joked. She laughed. My armpits were getting wet.
I knew I wanted to hold her
hand at some point during the movie. But
when? I couldn’t try for it too early. What if she got uncomfortable and my
hand got sweaty and we had to awkwardly let go? No, not too early. But it couldn’t be too late either. I couldn’t just grab at her palm in the last
five minutes during the movie’s climax.
No. It had to be just right. I had thought about this; it had to be the
perfect amount of hand-holding time, preferably in the early third act of the
film. If my thought process seems a
little neurotic, it was. Maybe I had
thought about more than just dinner and a movie after all.
The time finally came. In a touching moment of the movie, Wall-E is
literally crushed and Eve, the object of his affections, begins to realize how
much he means to her. This was it. The moment was right. Shaking in abject terror, I lightly reached
over, tapped my date’s arm, and I extended my open hand to her.
She smiled, and grasped my hand tightly.
It was a good thing I had
already seen the movie, because the rest of it was a blur to me. As we left the theater, I grabbed a Wall-E
and Eve sticker from a coin machine and presented it to my date. We walked out into the parking lot
together. She came up from behind me and
took my hand. If pure elation was a
drug, then I O.D.’ed ten times over in that moment.
Now it is four years later,
and that girl is my wife. We both have
very strong affection for the movie Wall-E
and the memories it brings of our first date.
I guess the moral of the
story is don’t go see something like Fast
and the Furious 8 or Generic Kate
Hudson Rom-Com on your first date. It’s
hard to get nostalgic about mess like that.
