Quick entry today

It's pretty nice and I think I want to go outside and hang around instead of being stuck in the house in front of the computer. Two things to tell you from last night: I saw "Fever Pitch" and had one of the worst experiences I've ever had a restaurant. We'll go with the dinner first.

Last night, Skaus and Sara stopped by as we made plans to go to dinner and then to the movies. Since the theatre was in Fenway, we decided to eat around the park. Our first choice was too crowded, so we decided to go to Boston Billiards for a quick bite. Bad choice.

We found a table and sat down and waited about 20 minutes for a waitress to come by. This place is obviously trying to be the Fenway version of the Rack, so they squeezed as much girl into as little of clothing as possible. A lot of times the women that are in this type of uniform understand that they have to keep their customers happy in order to get good tips. This chick was a dumb as a bag of rocks.

First she gave us one menu for four people. There were also a couple of glasses of half-full beer on the table, we told her that they weren't ours and she just said, "Oh." Already we're not off to a good start. Then we found what we ordered and she walked by us at least five times over the next ten minutes. Normally this would've mildly pissed me off, but we were running late for a movie, so I called her over and told her we were ready to order and that we had a 9:15 movie to catch.

She took our order (which was a lot of food because we were all starving) and dropped it off in the kitchen. After ten minutes she gave us our beers. About 20 minutes later we asked her about our food and reminded her about the movie. She said that there was nothing she could do. Ten minutes later, I glanced at my watched and noticed that it was 8:45, we decided that we had to go. I told the girl to cancel the order, she said that the kitchen lost our food order.

I almost exploded on her, but Aly sensed that and told her that she was going to talk to the manager. She explained the situation to the manager and he was just concerned about the canceling of the food. He essentially told us to pay our bill and leave. We laid down a 20 bill for the brews, but we thought better of it and walked out, stiffing the waitress. I will never go there again.

Here's the thing, Jay and mom are both in the restaurant business, so I try and give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to being busy (which it wasn't), stupid cooks (which I doubt) and just being dense (which she was, but she was really a bitch about it). The manager was the last straw, he was a real prick and it didn't seem to care that our dinner was ruined.

I'm not expecting him to give us the store for free, but I know how it goes, Jay has told me on more than one occasion that if he forgets something (like a bowl of chili or chowder), he'll give his party their apps for free, or maybe a round of drinks. It's just good business. You want people to come back to your place and small things like that help. This guy was unapologetic and rude, as was the waitress. I was thinking about writing a letter, but probably won't since we skipped on the bill.

Fuck Boston Billiards, they will never get another cent of my money again.

Following that debacle, we went to "Fever Pitch". I know, I know, I said that I would never see that movie because: Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore star in (both of them suck), I was really pissed that Fallon and Barrymore were on the field when the Sox one the World Series and I thought that the writers were going to put a lot of lame Sawx jokes, also I think the Farrelly brothers haven't made a good movie since "There's Something About Mary". So there were four strikes against the flick.

Imagine my surprise when I walked out of the theatre actually liking the movie. For months on SOSH, I've been writing about how I can't wait until this movie tanks, I wish Fallon and Barrymore the plague, etc. Looks like I'm going to have to take that all back. It was funny, the Sox parts weren't over done, the characters were sort of stereotypical, but not too bad.

The Farrellys managed to write a pretty good date flick that had a lot of baseball in it. That's kind of hard to do, but the succeeded. The things that I liked most about it was I saw a bit (maybe a more than a bit) of myself in Fallon's character, I saw some of Aly in the Barrymore role, the shots of Boston were nice and idyllic, the baseball action was lifelike (which can kill a sports movie) and it was a breezy way of spending an April evening.

One of the reasons why I think I enjoyed this flick as much as I did was because of where we were. It was shown at the Fenway AMC theater, literally a long foul from the park and it was completely sold out. The place was packed with die hard Sox fans who would cheer whenever the Sox did something good and the vibe was infectious. Maybe if I had seen the movie in New York or Boise it would have been different, but this was as close to a perfect place to see this movie as one could hope for.

Sure there were a couple of errors: the Sox didn't open up with Texas, they never had an eight-run comeback against the Yanks, there was one scene were Pokey Reese led off an inning with a double then was the next guy up (he's fast, but not that fast), they were playing the Rangers in one scene and the PA announced that Devil Ray Rocco Baldeli was up. Also, Fallon always found a parking spot right in front of her place in the South End (I read William Goldman's book about script writing, so I understand this) and he was a teacher at East Boston High School, but could afford Sox season tickets and a large place in the North End.

Some of those errors are a little nit-picky, but all-in-all this was an enjoyable movie. The greatest movie I've ever seen? Definitely not, but it wasn't a waste of time or money. I really wonder how it will do nation wide where people don't give a shit (or hate) the Sox?

BTW, this morning and yesterday we finished two of our bigger wedding chores: we got the band and cake. Thank god. The band is called BC and Company, who we saw last Sunday and the cake is from Kondeiter Meister in Brookline. Both great choices. I (as well as Aly) am very happy about our two selections.