By Lisa
My life just got awesome.
Yours can, too.
What changed my life?
The perfect chair.
In the movie theater.
I’m not even kidding.
Relax.
Sit down.
In the perfect chair.
At the movies.
They say you should enjoy the simple things in life, and I do, and so did everybody else last night, when my Best Friend Franca and I went to the movies and as soon as we walked into the theater, we saw that it had been completely transformed.
The filthy rug on the floor had been replaced with a clean maroon-patterned rug, and the walls had been repainted a matching color, but best of all, instead of the narrow straight-backed chairs that used to be in the rows were half as many chairs—and they were all as wide as a love seat.
It was as if the entire theater had gone from coach to first class.
Free.
Wow.
We couldn’t believe our eyes. We stopped in our tracks.
The seats were double-wide and they would fit double-wide butts perfectly.
And the chairs were not only huge, but they were covered with some type of gray upholstery, either leather-like cloth or cloth-like leather, but let’s not be picky.
Franca and I started giggling, and everybody else felt exactly the same way, because we all just stood there marveling at the massive gray chairs, oohing and ahhing like tourists at Stonehenge, if the monoliths were soft.
Then all at once, we all bolted for the big chairs, jumping into them and finding to our delight that not only were they double-wide, but if you hit a button on the armrest, the back reclined all the way, so it lay completely flat.
Does life get better than this?
Bestie Franca and I know how to relax.
O.M.G.
And the seat cushion was thick as a mattress, cushy, and vaguely Craftmatic.
Plus, if you hit a button on the other side of the armrest, the lower half of the seat rose to elevate your feet completely.
In other words, it was a bed.
At the movies.
Franca and I looked at each other in astonishment, then we started hitting buttons like crazy, making the seatback go down and the footrest go up and generally playing with the buttons like the three-year-old boys we never were.
And everybody around us was doing the same thing, forty-, fifty-, and sixty-year-olds playing with the buttons, making their feet and heads go up and down, laughing, taking pictures of themselves and each other in the seats, emailing and texting the pictures to their friends, and calling their children to report that a miracle had taken place and recliners had landed at the movie theater.
Okay, maybe only Franca and I took pictures and emailed them to our children.
We tried to call them, too, but they weren’t in.
Because it was Saturday night and they had better things to do than take calls from their crazy mothers who were playing with their new toys.
But wait, there’s more, because this bed at the movies had what every bed should have, everywhere in the world.
Bradley Cooper.
Just kidding.
What these beds had were cupholders.
And not a teeny tiny cupholder, but a big circle that was wide enough to fit a Diet Coke and a box of Raisinets in the same hole. And the armrest itself was so wide that we both could put a bag of popcorn on it, like a shelf.
What?
Does life get better than this?
No.
And just then, the manager of the theater materialized and asked us if we were enjoying our “theater experience,” to which I answered:
“You’re darn tootin’!”
Then he said, “If you wish, you can push away that armrest between and that will transform the seat into a sofa. We call it the cuddle seat.”
“Good to know,” I told him, declining because Franca and I have been friends for thirty years and we cuddle quite enough, thank you.
In time, the overhead lights went off and the previews came on, and everybody put their phones away and settled down, pushing the buttons to make their footrest go back down and reclining their backrest only a reasonable degree.
Everybody, that is, but Franca and me.
We stayed in our twin beds, watching the movie.
It was totally fun and great.
The chairs, not the movie.
In fact, the chairs were better than the movie, but I didn’t care because I was having the time of my life,
I managed to drink my soda lying flat on my back and didn’t spill any more popcorn than usual on my chest.
By the end of the movie, I was wearing Raisinets.
So that’s a tiny problem.
Maybe next time the manager will feed me.