Dinner (For Schmucks) & A Movie

Friday the 13th. The lore surrounding Friday the Thirteenth undoubtedly originated in vintage 1980’s horror movies. They forever linked the hockey mask to the chainsaw to certain unspeakable death. While perhaps there’s more to this spooky date than that, I offer my contribution to the litany of Friday the Thirteenth horrors, which also takes place at the movies:

Every now and then, my wife and I go out on something resembling a date. We’ll make plans a few days in advance. We’ll get kind-of, sort-of dressed up for a date-like dinner and then see a date-like movie. And so it was this past Friday that we had a fancy dinner at Pizza Hut and saw the highly-romantic movie, Dinner for Schmucks.

Dinner was everything that Pizza Hut has to offer and the movie was good enough, and we headed home happily unaware that tragedy had already struck. For at some point over the course of the evening, our camera was stolen. Yep, cue the organ music and B-movie scream. It had been in my wife’s purse, which was left in the car for most of the evening. I must not have locked the car at some point.

I can’t underscore enough how much it sucks. Yes, it’s just a camera, but I truly feel like a Schmuck. In fact, after the initial shock, I spent some time trying to figure out how I felt. For a long time, I couldn’t get past just feeling bad. I wasn’t angry or vengeful, which is what I would have guessed. It was more like disrespected, but disrespected in a way that “who would do such a thing?!?” doesn’t even come close to characterizing. Without my knowledge, some random guy came into my car, went through my stuff, and stole pictures of my life. I feel like I need to give my car a shower.

So unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of the evening, or of the past two weeks. Truth is, I haven’t included any pictures in a long time, for which, I will blame my intern Jeff. Soon though, I hope to include pictures again, as we just bought two cameras online, one of which is identical to the one we lost. They are both used and priced well below their market price. I can’t help but wonder if we aren’t buying some poor schmuck’s stolen camera. There’s even a chance that we just bought the one we had stolen. I’ll have to check for pictures of a Kings of Leon concert.

So, let this be a lesson to anyone who goes on a date on Friday the Thirteenth! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-haaaaa!