There was a palpable, today-we-got-a-substitute-teacher buzz in the air as people feverishly scrambled for a seat. They were just getting warm after a couple hours out in the blustery cold of Geary street and a good portion were coming on from the liquor and pot they'd ingested in the parking lot. All of it spun up into a craze by the speed at which they were rushed into the theater. The line moved so fast because as people handed off their tickets they broke into a sprint for the seats. Kevin ran at full speed, skipping the stairs and I tried to keep the group from coming apart. We duct-taped off a row of seats and someone came back from the snack bar with the largest soft drink container I've ever seen. Two popcorn tub and commemorative two liter cup combos with guaranteed refills. Everyone was new to me. I'd bought them some Jameson and howled with them in the ticket holder line, but now, suddenly with the arrival of the soft drinks, our rabid consumption was overwhelmed. The people in shiny latex posing for pictures and the news cameras got little more than a glance. Clothing was peeled off and suddenly people were leaning over backs of seats and yelling instructions to cohorts. But the drink was the thing. I didn't know what to do with it at first and then some freaky dude that was from Alabama grabbed it and looked down the straw and said, "Look at this thing. There are people that have never even tasted soda pop and look at what we got!" and he took a big pull of Sprite. Dude hit it for me. Just then, a guy that was sitting next to us came back to his date with a mini snack combo. Flimsy little bag of corn and a paper cup that you could almost get your whole fist around. I chided him, (in the ironic spirit of the moment of course) and said, "Look at your puny little soft drink. We have flagon of infinite refills. A White Tower of drink with showers of green digits raining down the sides -- a drink that is more drink than all of us drinkers put together." And within moments he was returning from the snack bar to his now approving girlfriend with a disconnected look on his face but a drink that he had to hold with two hands.

There was an endless litany of blockbuster trailers, all of which was met with derision by the hardcore audience (except for T3 -- some things are inviolate) and then Matrix Reloaded started. That's where most of the fun ended. I mean, it was hilarious at points. But generally I have to give it to the San Francisco fans for generating far more spectacle than all the CGI hackers in Marin can dish up. Opening night (or the night before opening night I guess) and a capacity crowd of 1200 is a thing of beauty. No movie could compare with it. The scene in line, out in the Coronet parking lot, is what I remember. It's what I want to share. People offering you Coors, you offering whatever you had, others eating pizza out of the box standing up, the smell of pot being ripped past your face by 40 mile per hour winds. Kevin running around because it's finals week and you can't calm down when you're supposed to during finals week, especially if you'd fronted for 23 tickets to the Matrix Reloaded and you're trying to organize it and people want to know where the liquor store is and what time it is and what happened to the scarf they had. There's a guy that's all alone, stepping out of line to smoke, when everyone is already smoking in line. Sometimes when you're alone and there's people all around yelling and commingling saliva via shared bottles of whisky and realize that your love of Sci-Fi has pulled you into a "popular" event, you gotta get away. A few people, tired from work are just hoping to get into the movie so that they can pacify their boyfriend and get warmed up. A few draped in sleeping bags, laughing stiff-necked. Some willing to give interviews, everyone with an opinion. There's the screamers and the waiters. NOBODY talking about the movie.