Paying with Pennies

Today my homies and I went to the movies. I love going to the movies. Like Tom in The Glass Menagerie, I would go alone and often, if I could. But I'm dripping with babies right now, and so we go together, in a gaggle, and not quite as often as I would like.

We always buy popcorn. Always. Eating popcorn is the best part of the whole experience. Because if the movie stinks, the popcorn is always there to save the day, hot, buttery and so delish.

We layer our popcorn with mass amounts of butter flavoring, in the middle and on top. The butter flavoring, not to be confused with real butter, is probably worse for you than smoking cigs. I know this because I used to work at a movie theater. As we squirted butter on the popcorn, the flavoring would splatter all over the floor. Then we'd walk through it, and it would coat the bottoms of our shoes. Little by little potholes began growing in the soles of our Dr. Martins, and we'd complain about it to the candy counter crew manger. "It's the butter flavoring. It's like acid," he'd tell us.

But here I sit, writing you, not even caring that the butter flavoring from today's popcorn is now eating away at my stomach lining. I'm just grateful that I had enough cash to buy the popcorn in the first place. Somehow in all my unpacking from California, I misplaced my debit car. So when I went to pay for the popcorn, my heart sank at the realization that my card was still sitting somewhere at home. Luckily I had three dollars in cash, and that money placed me half-way to purchasing the large, refillable popcorn.

"Maybe we have enough change in the car to make up the difference," my homie said to me, as I began heading toward pandemonium.

"You're brilliant!" I told him as we ran out the theater doors.

I spilled out the change and noticed that all I had was a few nickles sprinkled amongst a bazillion pennies. But a movie isn't a movie without popcorn, so we counted out three hundred pennies and trucked them back into the theater, cupped in our hot, sweaty little hands.

We placed our mountain of pennies on the counter, and I said to the cashier, "This is so embarrassing, but I left my debit card at home, but we need a large popcorn, so here's three dollars in cash, and here's three hundred copper portraits of Abe Lincoln."

The cashier laughed and then asked me to sort my Vesuvius of pennies into groups of ten.

"I promise it's exact change." I said, hoping he'd just scoop up the mountain and call it even. But no, he insisted that I sort them all out. I kept messing up the groups of ten because I was so nervous. "I stink at math." I told the cashier. This bit of info. made no difference to the man.

But I did it. I counted all the change, grabbed my popcorn from the counter, and did a victory strut all the way back to theater 14. I gotz no shame about it, either.