Alarms & Sunflower the Alien

Dave and I watched most of The Fall last night in South Beach. We couldn’t finish because the theater’s fire alarm went off about 20 minutes before the end of the movie.

After a collective “what the fuck?” moment, we all evacuated with the rest of the theaters. The fire exits lead to the parking garage, and a claustrophobic urine-scented stairwell.

The nice manager let us back into the theater because it was (of course) a false alarm.

Go back to the theater, he said, the nice firemen are going to silence the alarm and your nice movies will resume shortly.

And we apologize, he said.

Such a nice man.

After about ten minutes Dave and I were back in our nice theater. The other six people in the theater had returned too:

• Anemic looking indie couple in the front
• Young Hispanic couple behind us
• Obese man in white shirt in the back row
• And awkward hipster black woman who looked like a (short) version of Erykah Badu. She was a coffeehouse hipster (Beret, thick glasses, and the hint of new age open mic poetry).

Hipster Badu also talked to herself.

The problem was that the nice manager and the nice firemen were unable to silence the fire alarm.

Actually that’s not true – they were able to silence it, but they were unable to keep it silenced.

So we sat there staring at the blank screen lit occasionally by obnoxious blinking lights to the soundtrack of “ATTENTION, ATTENTION, A FIRE HAS BEEN REPORTED, PLEASE PROCEED TO GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE THEATER.”

The blinking lights were like a big epilepsy test. Seriously, it was worse than a Pokemon game. And that’s not so nice.

After twenty minutes we decided that if we were going to be in a loud, dark room with strobe lights that we might as well go to a club.

The rest of the theater (besides Hipster Badu) decided to peace out at the same time.

The nice manager apologized and told us to come back with our ticket stubs for a free movie.

So David and I went to laundry bar.

Laundry bar was a hot mess. David made friends with this creepy woman named Sunflower from Costa Rica.

Sunflower from Costa Rica read palms and told us that she suspected she was an alien.

Yes.
She did.

Sunflower from Costa Rica’s proof of her otherworldliness was a weird dent on the top of her head. Which she made us feel.

Yeah. She did.

Her very intoxicated lady-friend kept coming over to dance with us and sketched Dave and I out with inappropriate dance movies approximately every 10 minutes.

Hilarity.