No, literally. Y’all have deep pockets in your outerwear.
As part of our Issue Five launch National Popcorn Day observance, we asked several thousand of our best friends on Twitter:
We can’t help but admire both the extent of the smuggling and the commitment to the bit in this response. Other excellent answers included:
- The cleanup is key: “A bag of BBQ pork ribs (yes I cleaned up and disposed of everything, what am I, a monster?).” (@saltandketchup)
- Grandmas, sigh: “My grandmother, a Jewish immigrant born in the Depression, would smuggle cold pot roast or roast beef sandwiches prepared by grandfather in to movies. Wrapped in newspaper, concealed in a mesh shopping back with a sweater on top. ‘What are they gonna do? I’m an old lady!'” (@bagofmoons)
- Why don’t movie theaters sell donuts: “Growing up our local theater was across the street from a Cub Foods. We used to stop in and get donuts (maple bars, to be exact), and sneak those in.” (@corrie_hulse)
- A biscuit is never a bad decision: “A bag of popeye’s chicken wings and biscuits.” (@JohnDeVore)
- We don’t understand it, but we love it: “I once bought a top hat from value village, stored a large bag of M&Ms in it, tipped my hat to the ticket taker letting them all shake and rattle. I also was holding a full advent calendar at the time.” (@knpknpknpknp)
- Why did this never occur to us: “Cosmopolitans.” (@ckopa)
When it’s safe again, we’re going to the movies with y’all.
How do you read Pipe Wrench?
We’ve now talked to a few people who start with the conversation pieces and columns, and back their way into the feature story. Conversation pieces like s.e. smith’s ode-slash-lament-slash call to arms to a collective experience largely lost during Covid:
It was the year of a million Zoom meetings on endless screens and still, all I wanted to do was watch a movie in the theater. I wanted to be scared, the kind of scared that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up as my hand jerks involuntarily, a fear I couldn’t replicate at home on my tiny screen, the cursed toilet bubbling to itself and the refrigerator humming, the cat standing on the spacebar and bringing the proceedings to a grinding halt.
A fear that ends when the credits roll.
Or Soraya Roberts’ interrogation of where our snacking habits, where they come from, and what they mean:
If our eating habits seem hypocritical, that’s because they were. We were supposed to be anti-establishment, yet we were eating food manufactured by the very companies we were claiming to hate. Instead, the amount of junk food we ate acted as a weird kind of ill-conceived protest: there was no way not to be owned by the establishment — which appeared to be fully aware and willing to capitalize on our penchant for self-hatred and eating our feelings — so we’d bleed it dry.
Or Breai Mason-Campbell’s take on the role comedy plays for Black Americans, and who it includes — or excludes:
Maturity and understanding do not emerge from legislation or policed language, but from community, and conversation over Spades, dominoes, fried fish and hot sauce, or a Netflix standup special and a bag of microwave popcorn.
Or Mia Mercado’s satirical reimagining of Nicole Kidman’s AMC Theaters ad:
To paraphrase a wise popcorn box, let’s all go to the movies! To imagine. To dream. To fall asleep a little bit during dragging parts where the grandpa is talking about war or whatever. To pretend you can’t hear the high schoolers making out three rows back. Are they using teeth? I guess anything really is possible at the movies.
(There’s no wrong way to read Pipe Wrench though, we promise.)
Happy Friday!