Fire Alarms

Wednesday night, a small group of friends and I ventured out of our homes to watch Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. We donned our hand-decorated Harry Potter shirts and bought snacks from CVS to smuggle into the theater (I don't know about you guys, but I find concession stand prices to be ridiculously high). We showed our tickets and settled down into our seats. We scoffed at the "O NOES TEH WURLD IZ ENDIG (UGGEN)" trailers, wondered when Sherlock Holmes became a half-naked action hero, and reached irrational levels of excitement over "Where the Wild Things Are." We took part in the theater-wide "shh"ing effort as the lights dimmed and squealed as the first twinklings of Hedwig's Theme escaped. We snickered at the "that's what she said" moments and wrinkled our noses at Ron+Lavender. We sat, transfixed, as Dumbledore drank the potion, and -
The fire alarm went off.

No, seriously, I couldn't make this stuff up (well, I probably could, but I'm not). The goddamned fire alarm went off twenty minutes before HP6 ended.

The theater we were in was massively huge (this was opening day, after all). When the alarm went off, the movie screen turned itself off, and at first you could tell that the entire audience was thinking "... is this part of the movie?" Eventually we realized that it actually was the fire alarm and we all kind of grumbled and shuffled to our feet, moseying down the steps and out the Emergency Exit door. This is the first time that the alarm's gone off in any movie theater that I've attended, and I always thought that, if the alarm were to go off, half the audience would start screaming and running, but not a single person that I could see looked even vaguely panicked. I didn't feel particularly worried myself; the only emotion I was feeling was pure annoyance. I mean, it's Harry effing Potter, and it was actually a good movie. Grr.

Turns out that there actually was a real fire elsewhere in the theater complex, although I don't think it was very big; apparently the firefighters were more worried about smoke damage. Thankfully, we kept our ticket stubs, so we'll be able to get into the movie free next time we go see it, which will be this coming Tuesday (obviously we're going to see it again; we can't just not see the ending).

So, yes, I went to see HP6 the day it came out, and no, I haven't seen the ending yet. I'm glad nobody was hurt in the fire, but still - RAGE.

Would you rather be blind or deaf? Deaf. I would absolutely hate to be either, of course, but I hate not being able to see (which is unfortunate, seeing as I have really bad vision and am virtually blind without my contacts). I hate not being able to hear, but I just feel like I'd be more dependent on other people if I couldn't see.