Happy Valentines Day - My Worst Date

My Worst Date: Decision-Making for Dummies

2011 

Saturday night my boyfriend Nathan and I had a date. I wanted to check out a mystery theatre production of And Then There Were None but it didn't work out because it was a pre-view night only and I couldn't snag tickets. Friday night I'd had a raucous night out with my best guy friend from high school and my new wonderful friend Stacy wherein we drank a tower of beer and played cribbage at a karaoke bar until closing time. The effects of these shenanigans still hadn't quite wore off by Saturday evening, when Nathan gave me two options:

            1. plan something else for us to do downtown; or
            2. catch transit south to the suburbs and meet his parents for a movie night in.

There were other options that I considered after hanging up with the promise to call him back, (including breaking up, or jumping out a window) but they seemed a little extreme and were most likely a reaction to being forced into a (Gasp!) decision rather than a rational reaction. Keep in mind, I was mortally hung-over. (Note: have since discovered that I am allergic to beer, hence the severity of the hangover.)

Having no intention of planning anything, nor hosting Nathan at my horrifically messy apartment, I made the trek south. I informed him that this was to be the extent of my decision making for the week. On the plus side, the bus and train rides allowed me enough time to finish (at long last) Vanity Fair, and to put a good sized dent into my Terry Pratchett book. Luckily I'd thought to bring along two books.

Nathan met me at the station and we stopped to pick up movies. In my determination to not make any more decisions I made a rather obvious mistake. Guilt by omission. We wandered through the store, looking for a "mother appropriate" movie. She'd already seen Eat Pray Love, much to my relief. Refusing outright to make any decisions whatsoever, I nevertheless suggested (too subtly and to my regret) that Letters to Juliet was probably our best bet. Nathan chose The Kids are All Right. I'd wanted to see it since first catching a preview months and months before. I gave a (far too understated, must work on this) hint that the content may not be appropriate for his mother. A brief note about said mother:  she does not swear, and does not approve of inappropriateness, and is, in the words of her only son, "bat-shit crazy".

We arrived and Nathan's father met us at the door. He had white hair, glasses and exuded an active grandfatherliness that I would have associated with my elderly male relatives if I'd ever had any. There was a bit of the curmudgeon in him, but overall a good-humoured fellow. He shook my hand and told me it was nice to meet me. I informed him that my name was Emily and that it was nice to meet him too. Awkward silence followed. Nathan's mother bustled in with a steely gray-ness to everything about her. She smiled, shook my hand while I told her my name, and she also said nothing. In short, I still have no idea what their names are. Mr and Mrs Prentice, I suppose. Too bizarre. I felt 16 years old. Thanks for the soda, Mrs P? Maybe I'd slid into some sort of remnant of early modernist America and should have commented on the lovely wall paper. A faux pas was inevitable, but it's unreal just how badly it actually went.

We fell to discussing the movie that we'd rented. And suddenly it was what "we" had chosen, and therefore I felt the need to explain a little bit about it. By this time I was (slightly) defensive, and talked (probably too crassly and in too much depth) about the rave reviews and awards that The Kids are All Right had garnered. I was particularly familiar with it because of the Oscar pool I’d been running at work, and no doubt it sounded as though I had chosen this movie as our evening's entertainment. (I couldn’t have, I was on a decision-making break!) I mean it won 2 golden globes, was nominated for 4 Oscars (including Best Picture) and was a standout at film festivals around the world. Though I didn't pick it. Really. 

Defendant: Your honour, in my defence, I'd deferred any decision making for the evening, and therefore could not possibly have been the driving force behind the rental.

The Hon. Judge Hindsight: Your defensiveness indicates otherwise, Miss Statler. Your compliance with the video rental choice is implicit, and so you are most definitely guilty by association, and must bear any judgments that arise forthwith from your inaction. I sentence you to lingering mortification. Case dismissed.

If you're not familiar with The Kids Are All Right, the premise itself courts controversy for the sort of people who don't have first names and still have lovely wallpaper in their den, and therefore should have been banned from the "mother appropriate" category outright. The Kids Are All Right is about an unconventional family struggling with identity and change. It's a brilliant film, with absolutely stellar acting performances. But it turns out that there is a lot of sex in it. Drugs are alluded to, (Hell, they're snorted by a fifteen year old in the first 5 minutes!) homosexual pornography is featured, and there is practically a 5 minute montage of sex. It felt longer.

I sat in an agony of awkward mortification for the full 106 minutes. Mr P laughed frequently, commented vociferously and attempted to predict the multitude of plot points as they arose (he was consistently wrong, and would have offered comedic relief if I had been in a position to find anything funny as opposed to just horribly uncomfortable). Nathan's mother sat in disgusted silence, shooting steely glares over at the other couch where I sat a decent (and terrified) two feet away from Nathan, too embarrassed to breathe, but laughing occasionally in a manic, nervous and hopeless sort of way.

"Why oh why," my inner monologue lamented, "did Nathan, as he casually skimmed the back cover of the movie at Blockbuster (remember those?), not notice the rating which stated: 

            Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, language and some teen drug and alcohol use.

Might've saved a lot of time and pain. 

It was like my evening had been scripted by Richard Curtis, but with this arrested development feeling of being 16 again. Like John Hughes with a vengeance.

What an awful experience.

Somehow I survived. "Nice to meet you," I said, fleeing as soon as was decent. In fact, it had been far from "nice" and that I hadn't in fact met them at all, seeing as I still don't know their names. But those are the types of things that you say when you’re trapped in a 1950’s time warp meeting your (very) soon-to-be ex-boyfriend’s parents.