The Adventure Begins

Since the time my son (Ben) heard there was going to be a Spiderman 3, he has been tracking its progress and release date.

As the date crept closer, it was time to find the best theater for such a momentous event. After many, many phone calls the Alamo Drafthouse was chosen as his top pick.

This is a very important decision. As a mom of a movie lover I have come to truly appreciate a theater that will entertain you for three to six hours before the start time of an opening picture.
For you non-Austinites, the Alamo is a restaurant/movie theater that is known for its pre-movie shorts. Most of them I wouldn't even think of taking my kids to, but for this they were showing the old Spiderman cartoon and - my kids loved this - in the opening credits it boasted the fact that it was IN COLOR!
Another fun element to the theater is that if you would like to order food, you write what you want on a paper and stand it up on the table in front of you for the waitress to pick up. (This is an important fact as you read on.)

Over the past week:
At least several times a day Ben would give us the countdown for the start time, including what he would like to order to eat, and when in the movie he wanted to write it on the paper for the waitress to pick up. It's a science really. We're holding out that there is a scholarship fund somewhere for students with this talent.

The Big Day:
Ben called the theater at six to find out the best time to line up. They said it shouldn't be bad since we already bought our tickets and an hour or so is all we should need. This seemed very daring to the boys, who wanted to be there around nine. Despite their overzealous excitement, we decided to throw caution to the wind and leave at ten for the midnight showing.

We carefully chose our seats. Wrote out our food order and held on to it until just the perfect time (which we figured to be about five minutes before the movie started).
It was a lot of fun. We watched shorts on spider specialists giving us the low down on the creepy crawlies. They showed international versions of spidey, and those old cartoons - which were to fun to remember! I sat bouncing in my seat and singing the song, "Spiderman, Spiderman, does whatever a spider can. Can he swing on a thread? Take a look over head..." as my son tried to hide behind his menu and pretend he didn't know me.
OH, c'mon I know you're singing it now too!

Anyway, it's now five minutes before. We place our order up on the table and take our last run to the bathroom - so as not to be interrupted.
Finally, the lights go down, the previews start.... and stop.

Yes, that's right, the projectors busted... or something.

The managers came out about every fifteen minutes to tell us that it would be another five minutes or so and they've figured out the problem.
Some people left after a half an hour, but not us. I drank caffeine after nine, I was in for the long haul.

I told my boys that if we don't get home until four, there would be no school the next day. Suddenly, it didn't matter how long the wait was.

Finally, six free sodas and an hour later, the movie begins.
We didn't ask for freebies, they just started giving them out. Now, I'm really awake.

The movie was actually pretty good. Not a lot of bad language or awkward scenes. Lots of fighting, but these were pretty bad guys, right?

Several good points to the evening:
Lots of laughs
Smiles
Good memories
Free soda
We now know what the Japanese Spiderman looks like - Spiderman, who knew?
We pulled in at 3:50, but that's close enough - no school!

Another plus:
They gave us free movie passes and the third edition of Pirates comes out in two weeks! Guess where we'll be?