It’s been a fun point of contention, debate, and occasionally-serious attempted-reconstruction over the past several years. We’d narrowed it down to a few films, and finally two finalists: ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ and ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’. One of them would have been the first movie that Skip and I saw together, and we have spent way too many subsequent movie nights trying to figure out which one it would have been.
The truth is we had known each other for a few years prior to that fateful evening. I’d started working with Sherri in the summer of 2005, so it must have been the holiday party of later that year at which I first met her then-boyfriend Skip. Sporadically seeing each other at parties and work events, it was always a fun and easy camaraderie we enjoyed, but we didn’t hang out on our own until that first movie, casually agreed upon, likely at some party or gathering where we would have been talking and plotting a future plan.
Our first salient memory when we began to look back was of a guy, one of the only other people in the theater that night, who fell asleep repeatedly during ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’, and gave up a very loud series of snores which left us both in hysterics. But while that made for a memorable outing, I wasn’t sure it was our first, but when the memory popped up on Skip’s FaceBook from January 2012, it seemed like that might have been the case.
However, on my third day with a flu that had me housebound, I wandered unsteadily into the guestroom where my date planners were roughly organized on a shelf, and I pulled out 2011 to see if I wrote down anything prior to 2012 about seeing a movie with Skip. Once upon a time I kept detailed notes on the daily events of my world (I’m a Virgo through and through) so I perused the pages and days of 2011. It took the whole year, but eventually I found the very first documentation of that first movie night, on December 27, 2011.
It made sense – we would probably have been talking about the new David Fincher film at a holiday party, and our shared love of dark and disturbing directors and their films instigated the movie date a couple of weeks later. I didn’t know then that one of the best friendships of my life was emboldening itself, gradually becoming a happy foundation and fundamental part of my adult years.
