Movie mule

I got a lesson in cultural evolution last night when I took my teenage daughter and her friend to a multiplex theater to see an R-rated movie. The rating was for language only, which does not trouble me with respect to my own child, and the other girl's parent had given his permission for her to see it.  But because of "heightened security" at the theater, last night for the first time I had to actually buy a ticket and do exactly what this famous sign says:

That is, I had to physically accompany them into the theater. And of course it's every teenager's dream to have a grey-haired old woman along for the ride on a Friday night.  

See, in the Olden Days, which was all of two weeks ago, what teens would do is figure out which movies were down which multiplex hallway, and they'd buy a ticket to a PG movie down that same hallway.  And then they'd simply slip into the theater showing the R-rated movie they wanted to see in the first place.

It's a small, harmless act of rebellion.  If the worst thing your teen does is sneak into an R-rated movie, count yourself among the truly blessed.  

But now there are gestapo movie police who patrol the multiplex hallways to thwart exactly this type of subversive activity.  Which meant that I had to hustle my girls into a movie that I had no intention of participating in, which makes me a modern-day analog to a drug mule or something.  The poster says that I have to "accompany" them - it doesn't say that I have to actually sit through an entire frat house flick myself, right??  It's not my deal!!! I'm just muling these kids over the movieland border!!

If nothing else, this kind of enforcement represents a shrewd money-making effort on the part of the cinema, because it means that they're making an extra ten bucks without having a geriatric like myself proceed to actually occupy the seat I paid for.

Because, of course, they don't make enough money already.  Sigh.