Les Bonnes Choses

I was unemployed for pretty much my entire high school career -- with only a brief under-the-table stint as a convenience store clerk at a very inconvenient location during the summer prior to my sixteenth birthday as the exception. Of course, I was envious of my friends who were able to gain employment (I think I was the only unemployed one of the lot of us, though we speculated that one of my friends was, in fact, enslaved). Fortunately, our hobbies were relatively inexpensive, with our largest expenditure being a $.78 a week Kool-Aid habit (had we had access to the internet, it could have been even less expensive).

It wasn't until just prior to frosh week that I picked up my first job at the now obliterated Capitol Theatre. I had an "in".



I suppose there might be sexier ways to pay for one's undergrad -- not literally 'sexier' as in becoming a stripper, though I'm sure you'll have more than covered tuition by the time you write your first midterm -- and I didn't fill out too many application forms before I realized that that option wasn't available to me at the time. Still, all-you-can-watch movies beats out many jobs that were open to me. The only downside was the interminable reconciliation of the snack bar inventory at the end of each night, and the cleaning of the popcorn popper. What kind of challenge did cleaning the popcorn popper pose? Well, first off, try typing "popcorn popper pose" three times quickly without accidentally spelling the word pooper (I wonder what kind of hits the word pooper is going to pull in from google). Second, these aren't air poppers: they use genuine vegetable oil (they switched from palm kernel oil to butter-flavoured canola early into my tenure, and man, would I love to get my hands on some of that stuff - it smelled like butterscotch). Moreover, the top half of these machines are glass -- glass that had to be cleaned to a streak free shine after getting a thorough coating of oil and salt all night long.

What brought this to mind this evening was that I was cleaning our living room window, covered in Crayola Window Writer marker. Rebecca had cleaned it once, but the window was left with a hazy film. Clearly, Rebecca had never had the responsibilities of a movie theatre usher. The trick? Newspaper. A first pass with soapy water got most of the oil off, but a second pass with newspaper and water (we used soda water) left the glass clean and streak free. My guess is that something in the newspaper ink makes a really good cleaner. Whatever the case, as I stood at the spotless window with a Lowe's circular in hand, I felt compelled to share my fond memories of my first job, and one of the best cleaning tips you will hear nowhere else.