All Angelika Film Center employees were expected to work in every area of the theater (except the managers; they were expected to sit in the office upstairs and watch TV with the door locked). This meant that I found myself working the concession stand every now and again, far and away my least favorite thing to do there (favorite thing to do: get high in the bathroom. Ha ha! Just kidding probably!). Besides involving a lot of stuff that hurt my back, as well as the kind of basic math that's not so much hard as it is really tiresome, I had to wear a hat and tell people that popcorn was seven dollars all day. Yes, Great Aunt Complainey, I know that's a lot of money to pay for popcorn! You're at a fucking movie theater.
There were a lot of slow days when I'd man the foodhole, which was good in the sense that I didn't have to do much and bad in the sense that crippling boredom and creeping existential dread became close acquaintances of mine. It would have been nice to have been surrounded by something other than food that had been making me gag since my second day on the job, but I guess if the food tasted better I probably would've gained 20 pounds. As it stood I didn't take advantage of the theater's "have some free popcorn and soda and maybe some of the broken shards of nacho chips at the bottom of the nacho chips bag when you go on break" policy as often as my extreme poverty encouraged me to.
Sometimes having a quick nacho didn't sound so bad, though. And sometimes the lobby was completely empty. And sometimes I had my camera phone on me. And most of the time I figured if the universe wanted me to get fired that day, I wasn't going to stand in the way by not doing something stupid just in case a manager was going to walk by. I present to you "Single Serving Nacho at the Movie Theater," a short-form art film by yours truly:
If that makes you think twice about ordering the nachos at a movie theater, I would just like to point out that I totally washed my hands at some point during the day, possibly even before eating the nacho. And anyway the least sanitary thing in that whole process is by far the laxative-infused narwhal earwax they pass off as "cheese." To quote one of my co-workers, "You don't buy those nachos, you rent them." And to quote my Uncle Nestor, always gifted with language: "Like motor oil through a goose, kiddo. You get me? (diarrhea noise)."