To the woman at the Sunday afternoon screening of The Fabelmans:
You caught my eye because you came solo to an afternoon movie at this mall theater that seems to have 10 floors. I think you were alone, unless you had a small dog or sat across the room from a friend, like the two fellas at the last movie I saw, who would convene every other scene to hand off popcorn to one another.
A lot of people donât see movies alone, particularly in the middle of the day. The ones who do usually look like my potential future self if things donât go as planned. You didnât look like that. You looked cool. My friends in college told me itâs weird to see movies alone because theyâre a âsocial experience.â They couldnât come with me because the LMFAO concert was that night, and I transferred out of the school a few months later.
As for me, I was not the old guy sitting in the front, laughing slightly too long at each joke, nor was I the family of four. I held the door for you as you left, wearing a large blue winter coat with an Eastern Bloc photojournalism vibe, the box of remaining Buncha Crunch rattling like Yahtzee in my pocket.
Itâs one of the last theaters with arcade games. You didnât play the games but left into the first flurries of evening snow. I wanted to ask you what you thought of the movie and regretted not speaking up. Iâll be at the 3:40 pm Babylon screening on Wednesday, December 28, wearing the coat. But I donât think Iâll buy Buncha Crunch again.
Do you need to get something off your chest? Submit an I, Anonymous and we'll illustrate it! Send your unsigned rant, love letter, confession, or accusation to ianonymous@thestranger.com. Please remember to change the names of the innocent and the guilty.
