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Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Drove back up from Los Angeles the day before... said hi to the family, then off to San Francisco to an opening day showing of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers at the Sony Metreon. Great movie! Well worth three hours, throw in a bit of partying in Berkeley afterwards and it was a great night.

Bah.

It's never that simple, of course. Tried to coordinate a few carpools up to San Francisco, but that didn't work out with the other plan, which was to have an advance group (or groups) of people get there early to get a good place in line. One group arrived at 4:30 and found that no line existed, so then went to grab dinner. Constant and his group were supposed to arrive by 5pm, but by the time I got there at 6, he was still a few minutes out. Turns out I was the 2nd person in line... and one person holding spaces for 42 people just doesn't work.

Fortunately reinforcements arrived shortly thereafter, in the form of Constant- who organized this whole thing!- Maroof, Connie, and [insert name], plus the 3 people from the 4:30 group showed up!

It all snowballed from there... people kept coming and coming, such as Erik and Nellie, Constant's brother Randy, Kalina, Constant's old apartment-mate Karen, and a whole mess of people whose names I'm sure I learned but cannot remember.

Yummy Pakistani food showed up too, brought by Constant's request... then the entire thing really snowballed.

9:30pm. We're about to go into the movie theater. Someone pulls a f*cking fire alarm.

Metreon staff and security escort everyone outside, they don't track our place in line, they don't even bother with order; instead they herd us out the door like cattle and kick us down the stairs. We're steaming mad. Not only were we second in line, we were a group of 42 people who were second in line! Metreon staff almost got rushed by a mad crowd of LOTR fans, too... so they retreated inside and locked the door!

10:00pm. We still see people lined up to exit the Metreon... yet... another emergency staircase near ours is letting people back in! The crowd we're in is pissed. Fortunately security does open the doors before we smash them in... then we join the mass of people trying to press our way into the theater, each of which has a few employees blocking the doors into the individual screens. They made a vain attempt to get us to form a line, then they gave up, tried to check our tickets as we pushed in...

10:15pm. Sat in a bunch of small groups and enjoyed the movie. Naturally!

1am~ish... a few of us never reappear after the movie. We've still got a crowd of 30 or so loitering inside the Metreon as we discuss the movie and figure out what to do afterwards. Eventually we end up in Berkeley, snacking on Jack-in-the-Box and smoking hooka.

(not posted due to size reasons) Video clips available on request-- they're all of hanging out in the apartment, Constant showing off "tat" as usual and of people smoking hooka.

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