Way Too Much Butter

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• June 7, 2021

I took a small chunk of money and invested in some stocks. Not an impressive amount, mind you. Nor do I plan to sit on them for ten years. Maybe a year or so. With hopes that I’ll make some sort of a profit, maybe I could go on a vacation.

Mostly I invested in clean energy companies, some of the obvious/safe bets and the entertainment business, like AMC. I was convinced AMC is making a comeback. Plus, I love the movies. After I purchased said stock, I was then advised this was a bad idea because it was a meme stock which are particularly volatile. Admittedly, I don’t really know what I’m doing and have little knowledge about the stock market because anytime someone starts talking about it I glaze over. Ugh, numbers, how I hate them.

So the day after I bought stock in AMC, the stock went up 100%. Literally, I doubled my money overnight. Ha! See I’m some sort of genius trader/oracle afterall!

However, I regret to inform you I haven’t been back to the movie theaters yet in over a year. How I do miss it. It’s well known my love for cinema. Ever since I was a kid. We were a big movie watching family. While we lived modestly as we didn’t have a lot of money growing up, my dad took pride in our entertainment system. We had good TV’s and a blaring surround sound system. In fact, my bedroom was just above our living room and if my family was watching a movie (especially an action flick) my whole room would shake.

I think my dad preferred watching movies at home, as he always preferred being home in general. I suppose my mom did too, but she was more willing to do things/spend the extra money at the movies.

I loved the big screen. Everything about it. The trailers. How loud it was. The popcorn. Candy. The escapism of the world for a short period of time.

My whole family were/are butter fiends. When we went to the theaters, my parents would request that the kid behind the counter fill up the bowl of pop corn half way, add butter then finishing filling it and add butter again.  When they had the self serving butter, we’d add grotesque amounts of butter (if that’s even what it really is) and often, mid movie, my mom would get up to add more. It’s possible we didn’t even like popcorn that much, just butter.

I frequented the movies with my close cousin, Brittany. No one I’ve ever known added more butter to their popcorn than Brittany, which is saying a lot. It would get soaked up in the bag or bowl and leak out. It’s almost a miracle we didn’t die of heart attacks right then and there.

Almost always, I snuck other snacks/candy into the movies. Drinks too. I’d shove water bottles up my sleeves and pack my sweat shirts with store bought candy from 7-11. By the time I was a teenager and had a car, I’d go the movies once a week (sometimes more). I’d see basically everything. Sometimes I didn’t even look up the movies or times, I’d just drive there and see whatever was playing next. Often times, I went alone. There were some movies I preferred seeing alone. Dramas and art films. Horror, comedy and action films I liked to see with friends and family.

From ages 21 to 29, I went to the movies alone for every one of my birthdays. Look, I wasn’t a complete loser, usually I’d go out after or another time. But I always worked odd jobs and had times off that no one else did.

When I moved to Queens and started working in the city, I got even more creative with what I would sneak into the movies. Sometimes I brought sushi or pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. The lady who scanned my tickets sometimes saw the food, “you’re not going to eat that in the theater, right?” “No,” I lied, “that’s for after.” I don’t think she was stupid enough to believe me. I do think she saw me come to the movies alone enough that she felt bad for me though.

While I don’t consider myself an aggressive nor confrontational person, if someone is talking during a movie on their cell phone and I can see the glare, I yell at them. Once, on a date, we went to the movies and there was this group of guys chatting. I was hoping my date would say something as he was a personal trainer and rather built but 10 minutes in I could take it anymore and I yelled at them. I think this surprised him because up to that point I was very quiet. Another date, many years ago, the guy kept trying to make out with me. I was so angry with him and shortly after that incident, he was dumped.

It was unusual for me to go to the movies not stoned by the time I was a teenager. It amplified the whole experience. It was like pot was made for toking in the parking lock right before the movie.

We were big on movie hopping as well. Not just me and my friends. But my family too. Even when we were small kids my parents would take us to “double features” which was basically just us sneaking into a second movie. For these plans, we had to pack extra snacks.

Even though I usually tried to go to the movies during odd hours, like in the day during the week or very late night, to avoid crowds, I did also enjoy going to movie premiers. Especially to Nolan’s Batman films (to which I wore a cape), Star Wars, that sort of thing.

I love family movies too, particularly the ones with good jokes. Pixar movies are always great. My friends and I went to so ‘Up’ in theaters. We smoked a lot of pot before going in (as you do), and if you’ve seen it, you already know that the first ten minutes of ‘Up’ is a beautiful silent film that made us all cry (me and four guys). I saw ‘Monsters University’ alone and two mothers with a group of little girls for someone’s birthday sat in front of me. I was worried they would talk but they didn’t. In fact, I enjoyed hearing them laugh. At the end of the movie, one of the kids lost their shoe (how???). I helped them find it, but while I was searching I questioned how odd I looked, just an adult seeing a Pixar movie alone. I was a nanny for a family of four for many years. I always tried to ‘use them’ to get to see certain family movies. You guys wanna see this movie, right, I’ll take you! Soon enough, I’ll start doing that with my nephew, who also loves movies. He loves them so much, when he gets excited he jumps off the couch and starts jumping up and down. I used to do this too when I was a kid. In fact, he’s the only other person I’ve ever known to do this.

I was a tomboy and most of my best friends were dudes. Once, I tricked them into coming to see ‘Sweeny Todd.’ Tim Burton is one of my favorites. They didn’t know it was a musical. At the very start of the film when they start singing all three of them go, “goddamnit, Lori, a musical, are you fucking kidding me!” They were pissed, and then pleasantly surprised at the story and macabre tone.

Sometimes getting too high before movies back fired. I went to see the Rob Zombie prequel to ‘Halloween’ with my best friend, Jimmy. Zombie’s movies tend to be gratuitously violent. There’s a scene where a child Michael Meyers clubs another kid to death with a piece of wood. I remember I thought I was going to faint, I got so dizzy. Another time, I went to see ‘The Revenant’ with a fellow comedian. I had eaten edibles that my brother made. I should have known better. When my brother made edibles, they were always ridiculously strong. That scene where DiCaprio is mauled by a bear— I thought I was going to throw up. I wanted to leave, but the theater was completely packed and I was all the way in the row. I curled my body into a ball on the chair and closed my eyes until that scene was over. Even though it’s a very good movie, I don’t think I’ll ever watch that movie again.

The recliner chairs really became a game changer for movies. Even though the price is exorbitant, it’s hard to go back to attending a movie any other way. I’m not yet sure what the first movie I’ll see in theaters will be. But I’m surely looking forward to it. Lights down, sound up, take a break from the world. In that moment, it’s just me, the screen and these snacks I snuck in— also, perhaps, a bag of popcorn with way, way too much butter.