a story

so the mission theater here in portland has been playing episodes of 'buffy the vampire slayer' every tuesday night, for free.  it's pretty great.  abby and i went last tuesday for her birthday, and enjoyed it enough that we've decided to make it a tradition, even though they're already in season seven and we're not sure what's going to happen when it's over.

they just play the show off of the dvd, which means everyone can see them navigating the menus between episodes.  but at the showing last night, the dvd player started acting up and the girl running the projector couldn't get it to switch episodes.  the title menu had appeared after the first episode ended, and the option to return to the main menu was on the right side of the screen.  but for whatever reason--  my guess is a stuck button on the remote--  the cursor wouldn't stay there.  she'd move it right, and it would bounce right back to the left.  after trying a few times to no avail, she started searching for a different way to navigate there, but nothing seemed to be working.  by this point, the audience was already giggling a bit, and one guy started yelling 'just hit the menu button!', which she tried, but which only reloaded the title menu again (is there no standard behavior for menu buttons? it seems like different dvds do different things).

so after a minute of this, she just stopped the dvd and restarted it.  the whole audience got to sit through the fbi warnings (and wonder about the 'no unauthorized exhibition' clause), and then the main menu finally popped up.  and that should've been it..  but it wasn't!

i don't really know if this is related to what happened next..  but, last week, the mission theater web page said they would be playing season seven, episodes three through five.  but they actually played two through four!  and again, this week, the web page said six through eight, and was still just as wrong.  when the girl finally got the main menu back up, and everyone was cheering..  she selected episode seven instead of episode six.  everyone in the audience called out 'noo!' in unison, but it was too late.  we were back where we started!

at this point, everyone was shouting different advice at the same time, just like that robot planet episode of futurama ('jiggle the cord!' 'clean the gunk out of the mouse!').  but when, somehow, she finally got the cursor to stick, the cacophony solidified into intense cheering and applause, which only got louder when she finally hit enter and returned to the main menu.  from there, she moved the cursor back to the episode we'd just seen ('noo!'), then went back down to the episode whose menu she was just in ('nooo!'), and then finally hit and stuck on the right episode ('yeeaah! *clapclapclap*').  once she selected it, the crowd was ecstatic--  practically hugging eachother and weeping in the aisles.  we actually missed the first few lines of dialogue because the cheering wouldn't die down.

there's no moral to this story or anything, at least not that i can think of..  i just found it amusing.