Food and Drink and Prejudice | Frivolous Monsters

Whilst I?m one of the many people in the UK having trouble viewing and commenting on WordPress blogs ? which includes my own ? I continue with hope over expectation with three short stories from this month which seem to share the themes of food, drink, and prejudice.

On one of the cinema?s garish red settees, that in my imagination are the haunt of the cool hyperactive school kids of a Saturday night, I was sat waiting to see Stephen Fry doing his Shakespeare whilst quietly reading a book about cocaine smuggling ? hastily picking up tips to ensure that the stash you?re trying to buy from a South American dealer is pure ? by the light of a glowing snooker table-sized advertisement for an awful-looking Smurf film. All culture is here.

It was very good, Twelfth Night, but what was most notable about the first half were the flashbacks I was getting to an old episode of Columbo (Double Exposure, 1973) where Robert Culp inserted subliminal messages into the film to get his victim hot and bothered, driving them out into the cinema foyer in need of a drink, so he could murder him.

Being someone who rarely buys anything from cinema confectionary stands I found myself rapidly moving away from this firmly-held stance as the interval approached and I was soon confronting a plethora of unpriced drinks before thrusting a bottle of Lilt at a member of staff with the demand of ?I don?t know how much this is, but I want to buy it?.

Thankfully Vue Cinemas didn?t want to kill me: they just wanted to extract extortionate amounts of money. And they probably didn?t insert any subliminal messages either as I think, with one of their few showings that actually had an interval, they probably just turned the air conditioning off instead.

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I was in the right place at the right time in the supermarket with my eye on some in-store-baked German bread when some old gimmer joined the party and said to the man who was slowly reducing them: ?We?re not crowding you, are we?? Apparently Sunday afternoon at 3pm is worse as there?s much pushing, shoving, and scrapping.

?Hanging around you like vultures?, he added like Count Arthur Strong. ?Or locusts?, I corrected him with the better description. He considered this for a moment and told me that he was an avian fan so he was going to stick with vultures. I wasn?t that fussed to be honest, but this is what real people, in real life, talk about across a table of discounted bread. I mean if it was a meat table, I?d give it to him, vultures would then be apt, but as it was my simile was the better one.

The heat here has driven me to drink and so after this encounter I went to eye up the lager aisle looking for something reasonable and the thing that surprised me most was the discovery of Special Brew. I was surprised first of all that it was a real drink, and not a comedy imagining like Acme in the cartoon world of Looney Tunes, and secondly as to how it?s somehow survived the years of bad PR as the comedic drink-of-choice for all tramps.

To me Special Brew belongs in the Carry On world of the seventies alongside Woodbines, which I recently discovered you can?t buy anymore, but then on the shelf beneath I discovered Morrisons? own lager. I imagined it?d probably cost more than the Special Brew? It bloody didn?t you know. Generic larger, in a white can: How low can you go? Four cans for a pound! I mean, how bad can it be?

Pretty refreshing if you don?t mind your lager with 2 % alcohol, and I don?t, and on my next trip through Asda I picked up their white-canned version for exactly the same price. And so I felt obliged to go to Tesco ? to compare for research purposes, you understand ? and I was disappointed to find that they?d sold out. Like using Generic Lager as a gateway drug I?m now on the pear cider. I?ll be in the gutter before Autumn.

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I am a deeply prejudiced person. I took it for granted that a multiplex cinema foyer, on a Saturday night, in Bury, would a chav palace full of broken home brats running amok? And yet turning up for the first time on a Saturday night to see Kenneth Branagh?s Macbeth, being beamed in from down the road, I instead found it to be quite sedate with the only people of note being hipster girls in bowler hats.

Has the harsh economic winter killed the chavs off? Or have they just been priced out of the market and instead are all down the park trying to get high through burning Blu-Tack and banana skin?

I sat on one of the six sofas reading my book ? Douglas Copeland?s Generation X? this time ? opposite a girl in a dress that looked like it?d been made out of a carpet bag and I watched as the army of four hundred crooked pensioners arrived. I should?ve probably offered up my seat to one of the ancient crones, but then if they?d really wanted one then they should?ve had the foresight as me to have turned up forty-five minutes early after accidentally misreading the start time like I did.

The hipster girls were too cool for Shakespeare, whilst the attractive carpet girl obviously bagged one of the last tickets before it sold out as she was lumbered with a seat in the orchestra pit, but I was front of the queue and got the best view in the house. And as the room filled up I eyed with trepidation the two seats to my right and wondered who I?d be lumbered with.

They were literally the last two people in the room, from the younger end of the age demographic, and as they waddled towards me it was clear they?d just done over the concessions stand: Him with his foot-long hotdog covered in mustard and her with a square bucket of popcorn the size of your head.

I imagine there aren?t many instances in the history of the universe where people have turned up to a live performance of Macbeth with popcorn and I wondered if they knew it was a tragedy. This is practically Shakespeare?s Schindler?s List which they were going to chomp their way through. I needn?t have worried as shortly after When shall we three meet again? and just before Fair is foul, and foul is fair she accidentally tipped the bucket all over the floor.

Before leaving at the end I waited for the lights to be turned on, so I could witness the devastation, and found pools of drink under my neighbours? seats, as well the popcorn slick, as if in some dirty protest.

I guess that in the eyes of the cinema that this pair were the model customer as they must?ve forked out fifteen quid on food and drink alone.

And, as if in some self-fulfilling prophesy, I came with expectations of finding the sort of people that would put me off cinema, on a Saturday night, in Bury?

Which just goes to show: You seek, you find.

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Posted in Frivolous Other and tagged Bury, Carry On, Columbo, Food, Globe Theatre, Kenneth Branagh, Looney Tunes, Macbeth, NT Live, Robert Culp, Robert Sabbag, Shakespeare, Special Brew, Theatre

Source: http://frivolousmonsters.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/food-and-drink-and-prejudice/

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