Movie madness

It is no longer safe to go out to the movies. As a kid, I would go with my friends to the local cinema on Saturday to watch the latest movies. Back in those days, two movies would be shown, and there would be a cartoon in between. You could kill an entire afternoon at the movie house.

I don’t think we really watched the movies. It was more of a social outing that involved lots of walking back and forth from our seats to the lobby. We would order a big greasy tub of buttered popcorn and engorge ourselves on it while washing it down with gallons of soda pop that had enough sugar and caffeine in it to stagger a moose. Back then your standard American kid would burn these calories off in about 30 minutes, so no one ever got fat.

So, there we sat. A bunch of sugar-buzzed adolescents sitting in a darkened theater for four hours. We didn’t care what was showing on the screen. We probably weren’t very quiet. I remember once sitting through a showing of Wuthering Heights—probably the last thing in the world that young boys would want to watch—and we got a little loud with our conversation. A young man came up to us during the intermission and asked us in the nicest way possible to be quiet. We complied because kids still respected adults back then.

People are different nowadays. No one deals with social problems in a measured, mature manner anymore. Today, we’d probably be assaulted by someone. A young woman named Celia Riggs from Long Island, New York, for some reason decided to take her two-year-old daughter to a screening of, “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” last January. Unfortunately for her, she ended up sitting next to a couple of lunatics with no self-restraint.

Now, I’m not sure why anyone would take a two-year-old to a movie. I’m guessing that she couldn’t get a babysitter that day, but was such a huge Star Wars fan, that she couldn’t wait until another day to go. In any case, she took her small child with the attention span of a hamster to sit through a two-and-a-half-hour movie. Seated next to them, were a pair of individuals who must have missed their latest anger management class.  They were eating popcorn, so the child asked her mother for popcorn, too.

She got some, although probably not in the manner she expected. The young woman, named Keri Karman, started screaming at the little girl and then dumped her bucket of popcorn on top of her head and then proceeded to hit her on the head with the empty bucket.

Nice.

The assailant and her father bolted from the theater but a month later were tracked down and arrested for “child endangerment.” The child was treated for contusions on her head from the popcorn bucket. Her mother took to social media to help find the two popcorn abusers to justice.

The mother claimed her child did nothing more than ask for popcorn. In fact, since she has such a limited vocabulary, she was only able to say, “popcorn.” While I’m no longer surprised with extreme behavior exhibited by people these days, I’m guessing the incident involved more than just a single, quiet, one-word request from a small child. Kids learn early that the best way to get something is to be as annoying as possible when requesting it.

Something like, “popcornpopcornpopcornpopcornpopcornpopcornpopcornpopcorn…” delivered in a high pitched and demanding tone.

And that is how you end up getting assaulted with a popcorn bucket.