On a whim, because it just happened to be starting as I passed the Regal Theater in Times Square, I sat through A Wrinkle In Time. Having read no reviews I expected more. It was preachy, slow, tedious, and the lead girl character and her sodden interactions with the others didn’t raise my sympathies. The 20-foot tall Oprah didn’t quite work for me, either; and Reese Witherspoon seemed entirely out of character from anything I’ve seen her in.
I was walking off the anxiety attack from yesterday, waiting as the panic pills took about an hour to mostly settle my blood pressure, with maybe another hour before I more or less felt the light. I walked from here to there, and might have walked back except for the stubborn cold air and wind that seems to make me feel colder than it does other people. It’s like a cold that is in my bones, a heavy cold made torrential by occasional 40mph winds.
I’ll say it again, though: The pills work almost too well. I feel good today, even on predictably disjointed sleep, enough so that I might grab a 6-pack and get back to poisoning myself tonight. But I will try not to. My annual checkup is coming soon and, as usual, I feel like I’m tricking the system in cleaning up for a week or two, but I suspect that’s just a gratuitous lie I tell myself. Quitting for three weeks and then going back, is that any better for my system than quitting for three years then going back?
A Wrinkle In Time
One thing I was happy to learn is that the Regal theater on 42nd is almost opulent, with tables at every seat resembling school room desks, but with cup holders. The seats were cushy enough that in my post-panic drowsiness I might have fallen asleep, especially given the substance of the movie at hand. I expected more since the book was such an iconic title in my youth. But Wrinkle just gave up on itself, I think, wrinkling my brow as much as the tesseracts wrinkled time and space.
I also got locked into a stairwell that was clearly labeled “EXIT”. I went through that door and walked the two flights down only to find that an alarm would sound if I exited through the door that I think would have dumped me onto 41st Street. I did not want to summon Homeland Security by making them think I was attempting to sneak out or disrupt their peaceful universe. So I went back up and found the doors to the third and second floors were locked from the inside. I pounded on the door for at least a minute, not working myself up to another anxiety peak but contemplating the consequences of doing the wrong thing and just exiting through the alarm-ready door.
I imagined withering away in this stairwell, curling up in a corner and slowly starving, the tips of my fingers the last sign of life as maggots and rats fed on the rest of my carcass with its barely still-beating heart. Then someone would find me and I’d get free tickets to the Regal Cinemas for life.
It didn’t take long for someone to hear my rapping on the door and open it, laughing either at me or with me, I didn’t catch the vibe.
Other than that I liked the theater itself quite a bit, and would see something there again.
