When to Leave a Movie or Don't Let Snoring Dogs Lie

Have you heard about the film Departures? It won the Oscar for best foreign language film and I have been wanting to see it for months. Tampa, FL doesn't get many independent film, foreign films or art films, but when we do, they always come to the Tampa Theatre. It's a wonderful theatre, but in the 1920s, lovely crushed velvet seats as you can see in the photo to the left. So when it came to town, I wanted to go see it. Friends of ours are volunteers at the theatre, so I had invited them to go with us, but they were on vacation and we had another engagement for the alternative date they suggested. Going by ourselves to the movies turned out to be a good thing, however.

The ease with which we got our tickets and got into the theatre was deceptive and fooled us into thinking that seeing a movie would be a carefree experience.

To the left you see me before the pain has begun. Little did we know that you should think about what your dog does when he sleeps and then add that together with the soundtrack of the movie you are planning to watch, then multiply that with the displeasure of people around you to equal the atmosphere of the general theatre audience before you decide whether to see the movie.

Departures is a gentle Japanese story of a cellist who loses his job and goes to work as funeral rites assistant or in other words: THIS MOVIE IS EXTREMELY QUIET IN ALL RESPECTS. There are moments of levity, but WE have chosen the 2:30 showing, which in Tampa means that everyone who is serious about film is at this showing, plus some Japanese people, who won't be reading the subtitles.

We are completely oblivious to this. We are so excited to have our guide dog puppy at a movie theatre! Wow. A guide dog puppy at the theatre. Look at us! We are so cool. Fred takes my photo. We are so pleased with ourselves. Bingo falls immediately to sleep. We are now overly pleased with ourselves because he's asleep. How much better can this get? He's asleep? We are going to skate through this outing. Then the movie starts. And then Bingo falls into a deeper sleep and starts to snore. At first, it's just a snuffling sound. Barely audible to us. We ignore it. Then he moves into the serious body shaking snorts and wheezes. OMG. The

re's a funeral rite on the screen. People are looking around. Is someone snoring? Quick. Move the dog. I move his head and he wakes up with a loud grunt and, Oh God, a great jingling of his collar and tags.

He falls back asleep and all is well for awhile and then it starts again. Fred and I sigh and lean back. However, we know that within 5-10 minutes the snoring is going to start up again and it will be loud. So for the next 30 minutes, the routine is snore, wake up, snort, jingle, snore, wake up, jingle. Until exhausted Fred and I started laughing inappropriately and uncontrollably. So we had to leave the theatre. And while we tried to leave quietly. We didn't.

I apologize to all of those people in the audience. We thought he would be perfect, but perhaps Transformers would have been a better choice. 8-)