While visiting my sister-in-law some time ago, we decided to take ourselves off to the Sunday evening movies in Vereeniging. I’m not sure why we decided to do that; nevertheless, we did. Arriving in good time, we went to buy tickets. There was no one at the ticket counter. When my sister-in-law went round the corner to enquire if there was someone on duty, we were told that the ticket seller had just gone to the office. As it turned out, “gone” wasn’t the right word. “Completely disappeared” was closer, for we never saw her again. Actually, come to think of it, we’d never seen her in the first place.Back at the ticket counter, we heard some unhurried movement behind the sweets-and-popcorn counter. Peering over the edge, we spied a lady unpacking boxes of chocolates. Grumpily, she said the ticket lady would be with us soon. Time was whittling away steadily. We went back to the ticket counter. After we endured several more minutes of roiling impatience, the ticket-counter door opened and in came the ticket lady. Well, it wasn’t the ticket lady actually. It was the chocolate box packer. She was the mysterious vanishing ticket lady! She asked where we would like to sit; we pointed out the seats by row and number. She printed the ticket, demanded the money, and gave us some change very, very slowly. Was she succumbing to a vertical paralysis? Getting to our seats, we discovered she’d given us the incorrect ones. Deliberate malice perhaps? My sister-in-law and my wife had fancied that ghastly slush concoction. “No flavouring and the machine’s not working now. See?” intoned the chocolate-box-packing ticket lady. We saw. Still water would do: the six-rand bottle cost a little short of twenty bucks, a box of Smarties close to thirty. You can skip the Smarties but dying of thirst in the movies is simply bad manners. At least, after the movie, when Mother Nature called, the pee was free! Then I remembered why I prefer buying DVDs: no obscene rip-offs; no chocolate-box-packing-ticket-selling-vanishing counter assistants with galloping rigor mortis.
