Tuesday in Bend

On Tuesday, we headed into Bend to do a few things...

... we primarily wanted to see Reagan, a movie that friends had highly recommended.

The movie theater had us get our tickets at the concessions stand -- which meant that we were waiting behind people deciding whether to get the jumbo popcorn, or enormous popcorn, or astronomical popcorn! (Actually, I don't know what they were deciding on, I only know that it seemed to take an inordinately long amount of time for the couple in front of us to get their order placed and filled -- so I ended up going to a different line.)

After going to Oppenheimer a couple of years ago and being unable to hear a lot of the dialog, someone told me that theaters have devices that you can use to get closed captioning of the movie. Since we use closed captioning almost all the time when watching movies and TV in the rig, I decided that would be useful, so I asked about it when getting our tickets this time. The lady at the concessions marked on our ticket that I wanted a closed captioning device and sent me over to the customer service desk to pick it up. I had to wait for a manager, and he gave me some minimal instructions and a device that I was to wear around my neck that would receive the closed captioning signal, and then glasses that would allow me to see the closed captions.

My snazzy closed captioning glasses.

My assessment: they would be worth it for a movie where the dialog is hard to hear (Reagan was very clear dialog, so I really didn't need them). The glasses could fit over my glasses, but not very comfortably, so I took my glasses off (for the distance in the theater, I could see okay without my corrective lenses). The glasses, even without being over my glasses, became very uncomfortable on my nose and I had to adjust them a lot to try to keep them from being horribly uncomfortable. I don't know whether it was the glasses, or where we were sitting (about midway up the theater), or that I just couldn't get them adjusted correctly, but while I would prefer to have the captioning at the bottom, when I positioned the captions there, the captions were not very visible. I could get the captions to display at the top of the screen very clearly, and so that's where I had them for most of the movie.

Also, most of the previews did not have captioning, so I couldn't try to get them adjusted before the movie came on -- one preview did have captioning, so at least I got to see what I would be working with.

Speaking of previews... or rather, commercials -- there were about 25(!!!) minutes of commercials -- really commercials -- for many various products -- and some for concessions -- and some previews of upcoming movies -- between the time the movie was indicated to start (3:25pm) and the time it actually started (3:50pm). We were, of course, *paying* for the movie!!! (About $11 each) What the what?!?!? I'm sure the movie theater would say that the cost of the movie would be even higher without subjecting this rather captive audience to these commercials, but this was a bit much in our opinions!

We were in the Mill District of Bend.

After the movie, we decided to eat dinner while we were out. We also stopped at the US Foods Chef'Store (Carl wanted a cleaver) and Walmart (groceries) in Bend. A fun afternoon!