Well, on Monday night, I found a definitive way to avoid eating too much: Go to the dentist first.
An hour and a quarter before my 9:15 showing of Possessor, I had a rare nighttime dentist appointment. So rare, in fact, that it was the first one in my 47+ years.
Of course in the olden days, your average dentist's office would take its last appointment around 3:30. The 60-year-old dentist in a small town like mine was having no part of nighttime work, even if it had been something that was accepted in society at large.
Well, society has changed. My current dentist's office is located in a large shopping complex downtown, which I can assure you does not make it any less professional. That location may contribute, however, to the fact that you can make appointments there on Sunday mornings and the like. In fact, Sunday morning has been a popular time slot for me in the past.
When I was making my first appointment in (gasp) two years -- the pandemic was to blame for close to a year of that -- I noticed that I could book nighttime appointments online as well. I booked the 8 p.m. time slot as much for the novelty of it as anything, knowing I could then make a 9 o'clock movie.
Now you might be thinking, what the dentist told me about my teeth scared me too much to pig out on sweets at the movies. That wasn't it. In fact, I didn't have any cavities, I was glad to see.
What I did have, though, was a broken tooth, something I already knew about, given how obvious it was at the time it happened. A couple months ago, I was eating a chocolate chip cookie, of all things, when a large section of the tooth crumbled in my mouth. At first I thought some kind of terrible mistake had been made, and that hard fragments had made it into my cookie before it came off the assembly line. But my tongue felt out the landscape in there and quickly told me what had happened.
I had thought it might have been a crown that shattered, but last night I learned that it was, indeed, the tooth. I guess I had thought there might be more pain. I had even gotten accustomed to the rocky crag inside my mouth and felt no particular urgency to do anything about it.
But now that I was at the dentist, finally, it was probably time to look into it. And indeed, he filled it right then and there. Once again I have a complete tooth, of sorts, on my lower right side in the back.
Of course, you can't fill a tooth without novocaine, and that, my friends, is what prevented me from eating a small chocolate bar and two Halloween-size miniature bags of Skittles I had brought with me to Possessor. (Yes, it was the rotten zombie kind of Skittles, if you've heard of those. A story for another time.)
Having a right side of my mouth that felt like a boxer had punched it didn't prevent me from drinking my No Sugar Coke, one of two I'd brought with me as a course correction after Memories of Murder. Some dribbled out, but in a darkened movie theater, no one's going to notice that.
I was of course disappointed that I couldn't eat my treats -- modest in size as they were compared to the ones I'd brought with me last week. But I was also heartened to learn that I didn't need them.
Now, Possessor is a pretty full-on experience, full of violence and blood and trippy visuals. Nodding off to sleep is not a real danger.
But it was good to know that I can make it through a movie without a little candy-based sugar rush, if only because I must. I had no choice in this case, as my lip did not recede back to its original size and sensation until sometime during the night while I was sleeping. If I must, that also means I can, right?
We'll see. But I think last night could have helped make me aware of a new era of personal moviegoing, one that is far less destructive to my waistline. Maybe next time I'll see how I do with only the soda, and no fruity or chocolatey temptations to tempt me.
I'll have to hope it works, because I don't think I can arrange to have a mouth full of novocaine before every movie I see.
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