The worst time of my life

I need to tell you about the worst hour and a half of my life. No, I wasn’t kidnapped and held for ransom by sadists. No, I didn’t have surgery without benefit of anesthesia.

I went to see The Three Stooges movie.

I went with my husband, my fourteen-year-old son, and his fifteen-year-old friend. So, three adolescent males. It was a bad start.

I was the only person in the family who has estrogen and was still dumb enough to go along for this testosterone-fest. (My daughter’s exact words were, “Go see The Three Stooges with Nick and George? Are you crazy?”) Which meant I had the only purse for smuggling in contraband — candy and sodas that don’t cost $5 a piece. The boys were both wearing cargo shorts and put several boxes of candy in their many pockets. They rattled with every step, but you couldn’t tell they were packing as long as they stood still. Which left me to hide two large Red Bulls, a bottle of soda, an iced coffee, and several more boxes of candy in my purse. It was so stuffed, it was completely round. My shoulder was numb from the weight.

My heart sank when I saw the rest of the movie-goers: Everyone was either above the age of 50 or below the age of 15. In other words, the people with a full complement of brain cells stayed away.

So why was I there? Obviously, I’m missing some brain cells.

The movie started, and I spent most of it with my eyes covered. I knew the hammers were rubber and the power tools were fake, but it’s hard to watch that kind of mayhem and not be horrified. Eye pokes, smacks, head smashes, nose tweets, people falling off roofs onto their heads, things falling on people’s heads, chain-saws being used on people’s heads. The Stooges even had a kind of water-gun fight, only instead of water guns, they were holding baby boys without diapers. I’ll say no more.

While I cowered and shuddered, everyone around me roared with laughter. The little kids in front of me were screaming hysterically, jumping up and down in their seats. I just know one of them ended up in the hospital with a punctured eyeball later that night.

And the older people were even worse. It’s the first movie I’ve ever seen in which the teenagers were complaining about the noise level from the old people.

Throughout it all, my husband and son kept saying, “This is so stupid. This is so funny.”

All the way home, I had to listen to three voices saying, “Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk,” and “Whoopwhoopwhoop.”

I can’t remember anything so horrific since watching the first Larry the Cable Guy movie. Funny, I was the only estrogen-carrier in that theater too.