Confessions of a Cinematic Two-Timer

<If, dear reader, you believe me to be a perfect human being who never does anything inappropriate… please stop reading now.  I don’t want to tarnish your image of me.>
For the rest of you, I have a confession to make.  Yes, at the risk of being picked up by the Cinema Police, I confess that this past weekend my wife and I did something that we’ve not done since we were poor and in college — we double dipped.
It wasn’t planned.  We did it on the spur of the moment, and were ready to give ourselves up at any moment.  Truly!
On Saturday evening we bought tickets to see Doubt.  By the way, a VERY powerful movie… and one that will have you, at the end, debating what actually happened.  More on that in a later post….
Anyway, we exited the theater to hit the restrooms and then, as we headed down the hallway to the exits, we noticed a lot of people entering the theater for Seven Pounds, the new Will Smith release.  Like most of you, I’m sure, we have a limited movie budget — there’s only so much time, and so many dollars we are willing to invest on new releases.  Because we’d rated several other films as “must see” over the holidays, Seven Pounds had been moved to our “see it on video next year” list.
Still, it is Will Smith… and we were a bit curious…. so we said, hey, let’s just pop our heads in and check it out, just to get a feel for it….  (our first mistake…)
We entered the theater just as the previews were starting, and the place was less than half full, so we just took a seat on the side (our second mistake…), fully intending to exit if the place got full.  It never did.  And before we knew it, the movie had started, we were completely sucked in, and BAM, just like that we became cinematic two-timers.
I know, I know… it was wrong.
And we both felt appropriately wicked.
And we did spend a few moments locked in guilt, justifying our actions (“we spent 25 bucks on tickets and popcorn…”).
But I gotta tell, you our net emotional return was… happiness.  Yep.  In the emotional stew of Guilt + desire + curiosity + pleasure, what rose to the top was the pleasure — the short-lived, we’ll-take-it-when-we-can-get-it form of happiness.
Guilty pleasures.