Tonight, we went to see Mud, with Reese Witherspoon and Matthew M.  I never know how to spell his name other than “Hottie”, so I just leave it at M.  Anyway, we wanted to see it since it was filmed here in our home state, and many of our friends either had contact with the film crew at some point or with Matthew on his travels around.  I also lived in Arkansas County back in the early 1990s, so it was really cool to think about it being filmed somewhere I’d been a lot. 

There were many scenes that I recognized, including the Big Banjo Pizza, the restaurant formerly-known-as Andy’s, and the hotel that I drove by many times.  Seeing that flat land with those grain bins took me back to a simpler time in life, but also one that was, in some respects, more difficult.  Being young is not easy, although now I think it might have been a lot easier than I thought it was at the time.

I really enjoyed seeing the swamp, the river, the trees, the cypress knees, and hearing the sound of a boat and motor traversing the running river.  I do wonder what they did about the mosquitoes, though, as at night those suckers (pun, indeed, intended) will not only “carry you off” as my mother used to say, but they sounded like a jet engine starting up somewhere, headed your way.  You could literally sit outside at dusk and see the black clouds headed straight for you and your veins. 

In the movie, there was a phone ringing several times.  It sounded like an old-style phone, not one of those fancy ringtones that you’d hear in the “city”.  After thinking about it, no one except the evil Texas person even had a cell phone.  (Longhorns are always evil – I’m from Arkansas and no matter how many decades we are in the Southeastern Conference, I’ll always be a Southwest Conference girl at heart and loathe Texas as a result.)  The phone ringing was, in character and as usually done, an off-stage thing.  In other words, you’d hear it ring before you saw the phone ringing.  Near the end of the movie, the phone was ringing.  It rang and stopped a couple of times.  I kept thinking that it was one of the characters trying desperately to get in touch with another one.  No one ever answered the phone, but I just thought it was part of the movie plot.

As we were walking out to the car, there were three older (really older) ladies walking to their cars.  I looked at Sweetie dumbfounded and asked him if they were really driving themselves.  I mean we’re talking dinosaurs are looking at these three thinking the dinosaurs themselves are young kittens.  He said that would be really bad, because the one couldn’t even find her phone.  I was like, “How did you know she lost her phone,” since I’d been with him the entire time after the movie was over.  I’m picturing in my head an old lady behind us saying, “I’ve dropped my phone and it can’t get up.”  He said it was the one that kept ringing near the end of the movie.

Then it dawned on me.

It was her phone ringing at the end.  The characters weren’t making some great ending.  It was her phone.  AND IT WAS THE SAME EXACT RINGER AS THE ONE ON THE MOVIE.  That was the very best part.

As far as the party, in our new rental house, our neighbor came over today to say that she was having a birthday party tonight for a friend, and that it might get a bit loud.  I was glad they came over to warn us.  We got home to about 20 cars up and down the street.  I was scared that when we got home it would be so loud that we’d never be able to go to bed.

Much to my surprise, she didn’t mean 40-something-parochial-school-get-a-life (yes she actually told us that) parties.  So, it looks like even in a rental house, paying $500 less than we did in our nearly $300K home, we get more peace even on a birthday party night than we did on a Saturday afternoon at our old house.  Crisis averted!