2002-07-11

1:27 p.m.

My birthday took an upturn as soon as D got home from work. That little mutha luva got me a real live ice cream cake.

I have always wanted one and my dad got my younger sister one for her birthday a couple weeks ago. I could barely celebrate I was so damned jealous. My cake is better.

D also installed a freshie bell on my handlebars that says "I *heart* My Bike", a headlight and a taillight. Now the Schwinn Sugarbushes can ride fearless into the night.

I took a trip up to a selected party store to cash in my whole two-dollar birthday winning lottery ticket. I rang my bell at every opportunity. I wish there were more peds on the street. D told me that he selected that particular bell for it�s hot tone. I think it is reminiscent of an old rotary telephone�s half-ring. I gambled away my winnings plus three dollars on lottery tickets. I checked this morning to see if I won the Michigan Millions but I didn�t.

I wonder if my luck is bad since D and I snuck into the movies last night. We topped off my fabulous birthday dinner at a Ferndale "Hot Spot" with a bit of criminal activity. We walked right past the teens manning the ticket tubes and directly into the theater just in time for previews. I thought "The Borne Identity" would have been worth the full $8.50 but it�s not like I paid afterwards or anything.

I should be more ashamed of my delinquency but I have more intellectual justifications for my actions than guilt. First of all, I directly oppose paying a price for a movie ticket that is higher than minimum wage. Until minimum wage is $8.50 I will continue to rebel against this social injustice by paying for movies as little as possible. To think that a person has to work nearly two full hours at minimum wage just to see Tom Hanks climb his way up the lifetime achievement award ladder is an outrage! Secondly, since viewers are forced to view advertisements I feel they should have a choice in whether they want to see the discounted ad-laden version or the full no-ad $8.50 version. "Minority Report" should actually have an admission price of seventy-three cents.

I plan to elaborate in my anti-pay-for-entry movie manifesto for publishing (details to come) and even continue with my rouge behavior no matter where it may take me.

Believe me, the life of a no-payee can get very dangerous. One can never tell when a sold out show may take one on by surprise. For instance, One summer evening not too long ago S and I blazed passed pimpled Timmy and Gangly Greg to our spot in the theater showing "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood". It was one of those smaller theaters that houses only, I�d say fifty people. It was not a special summer night, maybe even a Tuesday but when we arrived the theater was half full. Since we had cans of coke and cherry coke in our purses we needed to make sure we were far from other theater patrons.

We had just settled in an out-of-the-way yet comfortable spot when some paying fools decided to sit directly next to me, rendering the contraband useless! Before the coke cans got any warmer we moved quickly to another out of the way spot. By this time, we noticed that the theater was getting very full. In fact we had only seven spots to chose from.

The next spot was out of the way but painfully close to the screen but by the third time some one asked us to "move down" or "would we mind switching seats" or "blah blah blah" we decided to stay put.

The theater absolutely swelled with people. Women actually. Just to see their damned Oprah�s Bookclub Ya-Ya. We saw a group of elderly women looking for a section of seats so they could sit together and I almost felt guilty. Some young teens took a seat on the floor next to their lucky friends who already had a seat. S and I thought that for sure, we would be discovered! I kept my eyes glued to the entrance just waiting for a young teen in a short sleeved collar shirt to come in for a head count and ask to see some stubs.

I should have known that we were unsuspected though. The trauma was more in my head. The lights went down, the previews went on and S cracked her can of coke. I never opened mine. I was psychologically ruined and feared two cans a crackin� would ensure our discovery as movie stow-aways.

It�s not always a cakewalk like it was last night. But I can� quit. Not only do I live with an enabler, I keep getting stronger.

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