The Lobby - An Usher's Nightmare

Theater auditoriums and bathrooms aren’t the only opportunities to wreak havoc for moviegoers. Just beyond the concession stand lays a wide expanse so orderly it makes your teeth ache. No Zen garden this, nor tranquil meditation spot with artfully trained bonsai trees and sand raked in perfectly straight lines. Americans, and our illegal alien population, are incapable of leaving this pristine environment for others to enjoy, so they spread popped corn seed haphazardly across this landscape. Other moviegoers, more intent on getting a good seat, trample said seed underfoot until it is as flat as paper and as light as a feather – and difficult to sweep off our purple and green carpets.

There are some upscale theaters, like the one at which I am employed, that offers patrons the opportunity to soak their popcorn with as much butter and salt as they want at a separate counter. Usually this area is ankle deep in popcorn as gluttons shake their bags vigorously to settle the salt – which doesn’t work as popcorn salt is so fine it sticks to whatever it touches first. Man, being an ‘intelligent’ species, has learned that most theaters offer small courtesy cups for water from the fountain just outside the restrooms. These cups have been determined to function as receptacles for popcorn butter and salt. As a result, I often encounter stacks of these courtesy cups under the seats, usually after almost busting my backside while slipping on butter spilled onto the floor rather than on popcorn.

The other night, while waiting to sweep up the popcorn behind the butter stand, a group of three chunky teenage girls and a tall, longhaired truck driver type I assume was their dad bellied up to the station. I could tell by looking at them that they weren’t from around here, probably from Granville or Vance counties from their redneck ensembles. Each girl carried a tub of popcorn – which probably explains why their bellies were larger than their boobs. They pushed and shoved each other to soak their popcorn in our fake butter (I’m not sure but I think it’s Crisco oil with a yellow food coloring added and some kind of coagulant to give it the appearance of melted butter – don’t hold me to that but given the fact that everything else we use in the theater is the cheapest stuff available, I seriously doubt that our butter ever came from the udders of a cow.)

Anyway, these girls giggled and shoved and managed to spill enough butter on the floor to turn it into an NHL hockey rink. Then they pushed over to the four ‘seasoned’ salt containers and each grabbed a courtesy cup, which they proceeded to fill with a mixture of all the flavored salts. Normally a dash of this salt is enough to cause a coronary, but these girls used enough to embalm themselves. Next, they reached up to grab napkins, not one or two, but twenty or thirty napkins each. I suspected from their less than affluent attire that they might use these in place of sanitary napkins back in Vance County. Then their father comes up with four large drinks and he starts grabbing himself twenty or thirty napkins himself and I wondered if the Henderson Wal-Mart was out of cheap toilet paper. Not having been there for the ten minutes the girls fought over butter and salt, he told them to grab extras of each, which they did by starting all over again filling courtesy cups with the remaining salt and probably sucking the butter machine dry.

In all, it took the four of them close to fifteen minutes to prepare their feast before entering the sanctums of “Alvin and the Chipmunks”. I watched them to see where they were going because I knew I’d need a mop to clean up all the butter they were bound to spill on the floor. Sure enough, once the movie was over, I found four seats on the left side of the theater covered in spilled popcorn, spilled sodas, spilled butter, and it was all frosted in popcorn salt. Of course they didn’t take their trash with them – they had just paid $6.50 each for their matinee tickets, another $50 bucks for the concessions – probably the dad’s entire government subsidy check for the month – why shouldn’t they expect us overpaid ushers earning $6.50 an hour to bus behind them?

It took seven minutes to clean that one row of four seats. I felt sorry for the next patrons who had to sit there because we only had time to mop up the liquid, but not time to rinse so that the floor wouldn’t be so sticky it would suck the soles off their shoes when they got up to leave. I felt sorry for myself too, because my mother taught me at a young age how to clean behind myself; and this poor, underprivileged, white trash, broken family were obviously denied such an upbringing. Yet, here I was, cleaning up after pigs that could care less about respect for themselves or for those of us who work two jobs so we can dream about living the American Dream.

If I can hang in there long enough, I’ll make general manager of this theater, and the first thing I’m going to do is to put the butter back behind the concession stand, and get rid of the courtesy cups. The next time you’re in the theater, with your arms loaded in $25 worth of junk food, a cell phone nuzzled between your ear and your shoulder as you hunt through your pockets for the ticket stub to see which auditorium your movie is in, look back and see if you’ve left a trail of popcorn in your wake. If so, stop immediately, gently place everything in a safe place against the wall where other cattle won’t kick them over, and get down on your hands and knees and suck up every last kernel from that smelly carpet so that I can concentrate on cleaning the auditoriums and bathrooms. Thank you for your patronage, enjoy the movie, and please come back soon!