Somewhere Over the Rainbow…
Sep. 24th, 2009 12:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterToday at about 1:30 I called the Hollywood Theater to see how the HD The Wizard of Oz showing tonight was selling. I figured I could just show up and buy a ticket to the event. Given that the Rifftrax event didn't sell too well, I didn't expect this would either, so I'd save the couple bucks on-line ticket fee. Who'd want to pay to see an old movie like The Wizard of Oz on a big screen?
…it turned out more people than I thought. The box office lady said they only had a few tix left, and wouldn't sell me one over the phone. And Fandango didn't have any for sale on-line. Luckily, there was a bus coming by in just a few minutes. So I snatched up my sandals, made sure everything was in my fanny pack, and grabbed my laptop, and was out the door.
After catching the bus, I went over to the theater and bought my ticket. Then, ticket safely tucked away, I wandered over to The Coffee Ethic and set up on the window shelf to while away the next few hours with my laptop. At 5:30, I caught another bus down to near Merle's Hot Dog Emporium, where I had the $2.50 Chili Frito Pie special (mmm, tasty) and then walked on up to the theater to get a good seat.
As I was waiting for the movie to begin, I noticed a light shining up in the back row—a reading light at the end of a snake-like arm, of the sort commonly on e-book reader cases. Sure enough, the lady (named Teresa) had a Sony PRS-505 reader. I chatted a little with her about it—she'd had it for a couple of years and was quite happy with it—and took a photo for a column I'll write on TeleRead after I'm done with this entry.
I also talked to the people seated next to me on the left and right, and handed them fliers for the SpringfieldGAME convention I'm helping organize next week. The guy to my right asked if I was into BattleTech; I said I was (I was even wearing a MechWarrior cap) but Robotech was more my thing. Then the movie started.
The feature was preceded by a 25-minute documentary on the making of The Wizard of Oz with a number of interesting facts. But about 20 minutes into it, the video portion of the projection just went out. It took them about five minutes to get it back. Fortunately, since they were "TiVoing" the movie (for re-showing at 9:45 to accomodate the people who couldn't get tickets for the 7:00 show) they were just able to "rewind" it and restart from where it had left off. And as if that wasn't bad enough, it went out again at the end of the movie (where Dorothy is saying her farewells to everyone). When I went up to the front desk to ask the manager, she put it down to a fault at the upstream provider, Fathom Entertainment. And she gave me a free pass. I'm considering using it to see the Eureka Seven anime movie tomorrow night.
But during the first such outage, I was curious if it was strictly local or nationwide—so I whipped out my iPod Touch and searched Twitter to see if anyone else was having the same problems. (The theater itself doesn't have wifi, but the auditorium in which Oz was screening was the one at the very end of the building, and the next building over had an open "linksys" network.) I found one person tweeting about a projector outage and replied asking if he was in Springfield, too.
Then the guy sitting two seats to my right asked, "Hey, are you 'robotech_master'?"
That's right: my world-wide twitter search…turned up a tweet from the guy sitting right next to me. What are the odds of that?
The movie itself was fantastic, by the way. For some reason, I had never been able to get into it as a kid. Maybe I found it too boring (all it was was a bunch of people standing around talking, and some singing and dancing—and we just had a black-and-white set, so I didn't even get the benefit of the transition to color when they got to Oz), or maybe the Wicked Witch scared me too much. I don't know. All I know is, I never did watch it all the way through.
Even when it was on cable recently, I only watched about half of it before changing the channel. (I think the Lion's song about being king overwhelmed my silliness tolerance at that point.) So this was the first time I got to see the movie in its entirety. And what a way to see it for the first time—on a big screen, the way it was meant to be seen.
After the movie, at about 9:30. I headed over to the Rendezvous coffee house, bought some hot chocolate and a cookie, and set up my laptop. I was too lazy to want to pack up again at 10 and go catch the next bus…so I figured I'd wait an hour and catch the last bus, at 11:00. This I did, packing up at 10:55 and joking on Twitter that I was clicking my ruby slippers together and saying, "There's no place like home."
My first sign that all might not quite be as I expected came when I noticed a number of buses pulling away from the terminal flashing "Out Of Service". Even so, I still didn't connect it up until I talked to the driver of the last remaining "Out Of Service" bus. Apparently the last bus leaves the terminal at 10:10, not 11:10. So by waiting, I had done exactly what I didn't mean to do, and missed the last bus!
"So what are you going to do?" the driver asked. "I don't know," I replied, visions of an expensive cab ride going through my head.
But that particular bus does a shuttle run for bus employees getting off work, and the driver said that just this once he would drop me off at my stop. So apparently the ruby slippers worked their magic after all. There's no place like home.
In other news, my business spotlight article for the Springfield Business Journal was accepted by my editor, and will appear in this Friday's issue. I'll drop a link in my Facebook and Twitter when it goes up on the website.
…it turned out more people than I thought. The box office lady said they only had a few tix left, and wouldn't sell me one over the phone. And Fandango didn't have any for sale on-line. Luckily, there was a bus coming by in just a few minutes. So I snatched up my sandals, made sure everything was in my fanny pack, and grabbed my laptop, and was out the door.
After catching the bus, I went over to the theater and bought my ticket. Then, ticket safely tucked away, I wandered over to The Coffee Ethic and set up on the window shelf to while away the next few hours with my laptop. At 5:30, I caught another bus down to near Merle's Hot Dog Emporium, where I had the $2.50 Chili Frito Pie special (mmm, tasty) and then walked on up to the theater to get a good seat.
As I was waiting for the movie to begin, I noticed a light shining up in the back row—a reading light at the end of a snake-like arm, of the sort commonly on e-book reader cases. Sure enough, the lady (named Teresa) had a Sony PRS-505 reader. I chatted a little with her about it—she'd had it for a couple of years and was quite happy with it—and took a photo for a column I'll write on TeleRead after I'm done with this entry.
I also talked to the people seated next to me on the left and right, and handed them fliers for the SpringfieldGAME convention I'm helping organize next week. The guy to my right asked if I was into BattleTech; I said I was (I was even wearing a MechWarrior cap) but Robotech was more my thing. Then the movie started.
The feature was preceded by a 25-minute documentary on the making of The Wizard of Oz with a number of interesting facts. But about 20 minutes into it, the video portion of the projection just went out. It took them about five minutes to get it back. Fortunately, since they were "TiVoing" the movie (for re-showing at 9:45 to accomodate the people who couldn't get tickets for the 7:00 show) they were just able to "rewind" it and restart from where it had left off. And as if that wasn't bad enough, it went out again at the end of the movie (where Dorothy is saying her farewells to everyone). When I went up to the front desk to ask the manager, she put it down to a fault at the upstream provider, Fathom Entertainment. And she gave me a free pass. I'm considering using it to see the Eureka Seven anime movie tomorrow night.
But during the first such outage, I was curious if it was strictly local or nationwide—so I whipped out my iPod Touch and searched Twitter to see if anyone else was having the same problems. (The theater itself doesn't have wifi, but the auditorium in which Oz was screening was the one at the very end of the building, and the next building over had an open "linksys" network.) I found one person tweeting about a projector outage and replied asking if he was in Springfield, too.
Then the guy sitting two seats to my right asked, "Hey, are you 'robotech_master'?"
That's right: my world-wide twitter search…turned up a tweet from the guy sitting right next to me. What are the odds of that?
The movie itself was fantastic, by the way. For some reason, I had never been able to get into it as a kid. Maybe I found it too boring (all it was was a bunch of people standing around talking, and some singing and dancing—and we just had a black-and-white set, so I didn't even get the benefit of the transition to color when they got to Oz), or maybe the Wicked Witch scared me too much. I don't know. All I know is, I never did watch it all the way through.
Even when it was on cable recently, I only watched about half of it before changing the channel. (I think the Lion's song about being king overwhelmed my silliness tolerance at that point.) So this was the first time I got to see the movie in its entirety. And what a way to see it for the first time—on a big screen, the way it was meant to be seen.
After the movie, at about 9:30. I headed over to the Rendezvous coffee house, bought some hot chocolate and a cookie, and set up my laptop. I was too lazy to want to pack up again at 10 and go catch the next bus…so I figured I'd wait an hour and catch the last bus, at 11:00. This I did, packing up at 10:55 and joking on Twitter that I was clicking my ruby slippers together and saying, "There's no place like home."
My first sign that all might not quite be as I expected came when I noticed a number of buses pulling away from the terminal flashing "Out Of Service". Even so, I still didn't connect it up until I talked to the driver of the last remaining "Out Of Service" bus. Apparently the last bus leaves the terminal at 10:10, not 11:10. So by waiting, I had done exactly what I didn't mean to do, and missed the last bus!
"So what are you going to do?" the driver asked. "I don't know," I replied, visions of an expensive cab ride going through my head.
But that particular bus does a shuttle run for bus employees getting off work, and the driver said that just this once he would drop me off at my stop. So apparently the ruby slippers worked their magic after all. There's no place like home.
In other news, my business spotlight article for the Springfield Business Journal was accepted by my editor, and will appear in this Friday's issue. I'll drop a link in my Facebook and Twitter when it goes up on the website.
