I REALLY NEEDED MY GLASSES TO SEE THIS MOVIE!

 

A couple weeks ago, my friend Pauline invited me to go see the latest Magic Mike movie, the plot of which can be summed up in only four words: muscular male exotic dancers.

It was a hot and humid day, so the thought of spending an afternoon in a comfy air-conditioned theater while staring at larger-than-life scantily clad men definitely had its appeal.

As it turned out, Pauline and I were the only ones in the theater.

“I can’t believe this!” Pauline said as we selected our seats. “It’s like we’re having a private showing of the movie.”

“Yeah, this is great!” I said,  “We can jump up and yell, ‘take it off!’ without  disturbing anyone!”

The look she gave me told me she thought I might be getting just a little too enthusiastic.

As the movie began, I reached into my handbag for my glasses. I wanted to be able to see every little detail on the screen in crystal clarity. But my search turned up empty.

I felt the top of my head, thinking maybe my glasses were up there, as they had been on numerous occasions in the past when I’d thought I’d lost them. The only thing on my head was hair.

Frantically, I rummaged through the contents in the black abyss known as the bottom of my handbag. It was too dark to see anything, so I had to use the touch and feel method. And believe me, some of the things I ended up touching and feeling defied description. I began to feel like a contestant on a game show called, “Name that Lint-Covered Blob!”

I finally concluded that my glasses weren’t in my handbag. The strange thing, however, was I had worn them while driving to the movie theater. And I clearly remembered removing them and shoving them into my handbag before I got out of the car.  So, where, I wondered, were they?

I decided to postpone my search and watch the movie. The only problem was, without my glasses, the images on the screen looked a little fuzzy, so I found myself squinting quite a bit. And during the scenes where the guys in the movie stripped off their clothes, I squinted even harder. By the time the movie ended, I’d developed an entirely new set of crow’s feet.

Pauline and I had taken separate cars to the theater, so as she drove away, I still was sitting in my car, searching for my glasses. I looked on the seats, under the seats, in the back seat – and I found nothing. Then I got out of the car and looked around it and under it. Still nothing. My glasses, I decided, had to be back in theater.

So I headed back inside to check the lost-and-found. When that turned up nothing, I sought the help of a young employee with a flashlight and we searched the rows of seats in the theater. We checked between them, under them and on top of them, but once again the search turned out to be futile.

“Maybe someone else who was in the theater picked them up and just hasn’t turned them in yet,” the employee said.

“I doubt that,” I said. “Unless it was a ghost. My friend and I were the only ones in the theater. We had the whole place to ourselves.”

I drove home muttering under my breath. I’d had those glasses only a month, and now they were gone, vanished into thin air.

When I got home, I grabbed a flashlight and made a more thorough search of my car. I found a big ball of dog fur I thought might be hiding my glasses, but the only thing it was hiding was more dog fur. I also found 53 cents in change, a broken plastic ice scraper and four lifesaver candies in various stages of decomposition.

Defeated, I went into the house and put on my old, scratched, lopsided glasses, which were only a hair better than wearing no glasses at all. Then I mentally calculated how many weeks I’d have to live on Ramen noodles if I had to splurge on some new eyewear.

As the evening progressed, I became so aggravated while trying to look between the scratches on the lenses of my old glasses, I decided to go out and check my car one more time. The car was the last place I had seen my new glasses before I’d gone into the movie theater, so I was positive they had to be in there somewhere. There was no other explanation.

Sure enough, they were there – on the passenger’s side in the door compartment where I’d stored a bunch of maps (my car, which came over on the Mayflower, doesn’t have a GPS system). How my glasses got way over on the passenger’s side shall forever remain a mystery to me. 

And now that my vision has been restored to 20/20, I’m thinking maybe I should go see that Magic Mike movie again…you know, just in case I missed some integral part of the plot.

 

 

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