Thus ends my life's new longest theater drought

I wrote a post with this same title back in June, only it didn't have the word "new" in it. I never figured I would have an occasion to start another long drought without seeing a movie in the theater, this soon, for this reason. If I were to start another such drought, I might have guessed I was more likely to go into coma than for us all to go into an even longer COVID closure of local movie theaters than the one that precipitated my 104-day drought from March 10th to June 22nd. 

Well, there must be something unlucky about going to see a movie on the 10th of the month. Because when I saw a repertory screening of Mary Poppins on vacation in Lakes Entrance, about four hours from our home in Melbourne, on the 10th of July, that started a brand new drought, as my state of Victoria got really walloped by COVID on our second wave.

I thought 104 days was long enough to write a post about? This one blows that one out of the water.

How about 122 days?

Yes, that's more than four months if you are going to call a month 30 days. A bunch of these months have 31, so it places me only on the 10th of the month again -- on the day I'm posting this, if not the day I actually broke the drought.

That was last night, November 9th, on more or less the first day cinemas were back open. I say "more or less" because I'd stopped even bothering to obsessively count the days or look ahead to a time when this might all be over. The election helped provide an actual reason for my distraction. Plus, things were changing every weekend with new announcements from the premier, and this latest one was actually only just announced Sunday, following a whole week without any new coronavirus cases reported. 

But in truth, I think I kind of "forgot" about going to the movies. As you will recall from this post, I had already given up on Tenet. Most of the other big movies have run scrambling to 2021 or to the small screen. This second wave in Victoria was so bad -- by our standards, which still means less than 1,000 deaths in the whole country -- that taken in combination with the moribund cinematic attendance in the U.S., I maybe kind of thought going to the movies was just over.

Turns out, no.

I can tell you for sure that Cinema Nova in Carlton has survived. That's where I found myself last night, in a lobby bustling with activity, buying my ticket to Kajillionaire. Actually, redeeming a ticket I had bought earlier online, since each movie is limited to only 20 people. I have a critics card, you may remember, but those cards are not being accepted for now. Which is just as well. I was only too happy to be contributing my $20.50 for the ticket, and then an additional $13 dollars for a large Coke and a plastic tube filled with M&M's. I was only too happy to give Cinema Nova my $33.50 instead of cashing in a free ticket and sneaking in a can of soda and a bag of candy in my pockets.

And because we've had zero cases in the whole country for more than a week, people did not seem to be succumbing to panic attacks about the bustling lobby. We were all wearing masks, if not fully socially distancing at every moment of our passage through the Nova entry quarters.

It did my heart good to see people returning to the movies with open arms. Kajillionaire, the new film from Miranda July, may not be bursting with mainstream appeal, not that the customers of this arthouse theater might be looking for that anyway. But my screening was either at capacity or almost.

I did have an awkward moment after realizing that the website had preselected me a less-than-optimal seat. I had gotten the orientation toward the screen wrong, which means I was at the back instead of my preferred proximity to the front. So I selected any old seat, looking nervously as any new person or group of persons came in. If I were sitting in their seat, not only would I have created the usual faux pas that accompanies that sort of thing, but I might have also tainted their seat with corona. 

But no one came looking for the seat I had chosen, thank goodness.

I did wonder, when selecting seats, why more of them had not been blocked off. It looked like far more than 20 seats out of that particular auditorium were available for purchase. But my wife theorized that once you select a seat, it creates kind of a "blast zone" around those seats, removing the seats nearby from selection by the next prospective customer. I liked that visual.

And I liked the visual I had come to see, which was a movie up on a large screen, in the dark, with strangers around me. In the general vicinity, anyway.

Now, to see if this enthusiasm can continue after Day One.

Nova has gotten out ahead of the other theaters, as it did last time. In fact, last time, theaters were closed again before some of them were even able to open.

But the biggest chain, Hoyts, throws its doors open on Thursday, at which point I will, at long last, be able to watch the aforementioned Tenet.

And maybe, with Joe Biden already assembling his coronavirus task force, the new president-elect can begin saving movie theaters in the U.S. -- nay, the very social tradition of going to the movies -- from extinction.

It's the dawn of a new day.