Movie night

It happens every time I come home to the states, without fail. I go into a restaurant with my folks, try to order a drink, and get negged because I've forgotten to bring my ID with me. The fact that I'm 32 and (I think) look it, and am actually in the joint with my parents, who were there at my birth, doesn't make any difference. Yeah, and I know the whole thing about how they could lose their license if they didn't ask anyone who appears to be under the age of 73 to produce a driver's license, but it doesn't make it any less of a drag. I've got to remember to carry the damn thing.

It happened again at Julio's in Montpelier last night. Julio's has changed under new ownership, and not for the better. The food was even more mediocre than it used to be. They played cheesy music, screwed up most of our orders, and our waiter had this oddly ponderous affect. He kept calling everyone "friend." "Could I have a side of guacamole with that?" "Yes, you can, friend."

Before dinner, we saw the Prairie Home Companion movie at the Savoy. (The show started at 6:30 and it was sold out, of course, by ten after six. It's hard to imagine a place more perfectly representative of the film's target demographic than the Savoy's customer base.) I thought the movie was pretty good, but not amazing, and it was obvious a lot of the intervening dialogue had been improvised. There were some interesting characters there but a lot of them never seemed to fulfil their promise, apart from Meryl Streep as a blowsy radio singer and the cowboy duo of Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly, who were great. And I have to admit I was totally distracted by how weird looking Garrison Keillor is. Man, what a mug. He looks like one of those freaky fish that lives on the bottom of a really deep ocean trench.