Concessions

Wow, rich people! WOW! I mean, just wow. Nice work. Your lives are
great. You just eat fancy hamburgers and recline in plush robot
armchairs, and then you push a button and a friendly gal trots to your
side and speaks to you in the Royal We and brings you as many
hamburgers as you desire? Seriously, kudos. (Where’s that button?
Will someone bring me a Kudos?)

I know your secrets, rich people, because I was one of you yesterday
for a few short, sweet hours in the cool, slate-tiled confines of Gold
Class Cinemas at Redmond Town Center. GCC (I call it GCC because we are
that kind of casual bros now) is a luxury movie theater for luxury
people who want to enjoy Hollywood movies without the mess of
dung-encrusted riff-raff—their clouds of flies and squiggly
stink lines obscuring the screen; their pet chickens and barnyard
mannerisms; their banjos and shotgun weddings; their overalls and
lassos; their empty, sad, and doubtless chicken-fried wallets. GCC
costs $35 a ticket. Suck it, poors!

The interior of GCC feels like a cruise ship if, say, Starbucks made
cruise ships. There is a lobby with clusters of earth-toned chairs and
innocuous art. There are some weird artificial fireplaces. The
bathroom is a mansion. Everyone is incredibly calm and helpful.
A person who can (and by can I mean will) only be described as
the lady-butler takes your food order (glasses of wine, blue-cheese
fondue with chips, several small hamburgers, brie and mushroom pizza)
then escorts you down a looong hallway with many identical doors
leading off to the right and left. There is no one in the hallway but
you. You enter the theater.

We were in theater 7. We were the only people in theater 7.
After we took our seats, the lady-butler showed us the button we could
press to summon her, should we find ourselves in need of an additional
small hamburger or some crème brûlée. (Can you
hurry up? This is a CRÈME BRÛLÉE EMERGENCY!)
She opened up the arm of my seat to reveal a secret chamber for
stashing treasures. There was something knit and fuzzy in there. Being
myself a secret bumpkin (and also annoying), I shouted, “FREE SWEATER!”
The lady-butler looked at me. “No,” she said, patiently. “It’s a
blanket. Will we be needing extra blankets today?” No, thank you, we
are quite warm enough.

Then it was time to recline. The wealthy love to recline, and these
recliners are delightfully bedlike. I could easily have stayed
there, reclined, eating liquid blue cheese and watching movies
forever. Then I discovered, while almost horizontal, that I could
no longer quite reach the lady-butler-summoning button. I wondered if
there was a closer button I could push that would summon someone to
come push the button to summon the lady-butler. Siiigh. It’s not easy
being so wealthy and so reclined.