Over the long weekend, Boyfriend and I went to see
Curse Of The Golden Flower. It was deeply awesome. This post is not about the movie.
Instead, this post is about what happened in the theater while the movie happened to be playing. About five minutes into the movie, a woman entered with a small child (maybe 2 or 3 years old) and sat in the seat directly in front of Boyfriend.
For those of you not familiar with
Curse Of The Golden Flower, let me just say that it is not a movie that is age-appropriate for a 2-3 year old kid. There is a lot of boring talking mixed in with a decent amount of loud, scary violence.
The small child, quite reasonably, was not interested in the movie. He talked constantly. And I really mean constantly. Without let up. He struggled around as his mother tried to hold him. He talked some more. She occasionally shushed him in a loud voice.
After about five minutes of this, the mother got up and took the kid out of the theater. I assumed that she had realized her child was not going to sit quietly, and she was choosing to leave the movie. But no, in a few moments they returned, as loud as before.
Another patron got up and left the theater, returning moments later with an usher. The usher whispered to the woman with the child, and she replied (loudly) that she had paid for her ticket and nobody had any right to order her around. The usher left. Woman and child remained.
After another five to ten minutes of small child talking and fidgeting, the woman started talking on her cell phone.
I would like to point out at this point that I did NOT punch her. I think I deserve cookies for this.
Once she started talking on her cell, I leaned over and told Boyfriend that I was going to go complain to the management. Since he was closer to the isle, he opted to get up and go do it instead, while I stayed to keep an eye on our stuff. The patron who had gotten the usher earlier also got up at almost the same moment and went out of the theater with Boyfriend.
This time, the usher came in and asked the woman to come out of the theater so they could talk. The woman loudly objected (remember, the movie is still going on this entire time), but she got up and left along with her child.
We were then all treated to hearing her yelling at the usher from out in the hallway. After repeating that she had paid for her ticket, etc, she said something that completely startled me.
"Yes it is, yes it is, because you're black and they're white!!!"
It's true, the woman was black, as was the usher, and my boyfriend and the other patron who complained were both white. I had honestly not even really noticed that fact until I heard the woman yell this.
(Of course, both she and the usher were female, too, yet she didn't say, "Because you're a woman and they're men!!!")
The woman and her kid finally left the movie.
The fact that this occurred on the weekend of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday seems significant somehow. I've never personally seen an example of somebody "playing the race card" like that before. It makes me wonder about that woman and want to meet her again, to ask her why she felt the way she did.
