An argument pops up at the theater

I like popcorn. I especially like popcorn when I’m watching a movie. This has frequently brought me into conflict with the popcorn pricing policies of Regal Theaters. And over the holidays -- when my wife and I saw a lot of movies -- it brought me into an absurd debate with her, as well.

It came about when we went to a 4 o’clock matinee of “King Kong.” Because it is a long picture -- man, is it long -- we knew we were going to be hungry before it was over.

This posed a problem.

Do we ruin our appetites for dinner by loading up on popcorn? Or do we tough it through those three hours popcornless?

The obvious compromise would be to get each of us a small bag of popcorn and have it both ways. But this isn’t possible in a Regal Theater.

At $5, the “small” popcorn is not only ridiculously expensive but a dietary overload. So Sherry and I have solved this problem in the past by buying one small popcorn and dividing it. That’s why -- as we stood in a long popcorn line -- I said cheerfully: “We’ll do the usual -- get one and divide it?”

I offered this as a rhetorical question, and she startled me by responding from that wondrous place women can get to without warning and any visible prior reasoning.

“I want my own bag.”

I thought that was funny and laughed. She didn’t join me.

I’ve learned that if I dismiss such unreason arbitrarily, it exacerbates the problem. So I pointed out patiently that this had been our practice many times before, that it worked quite well, and that sharing would not leave us with two half-eaten bags of popcorn. We would also be out only five bucks instead of 10.

She said, “I want my own bag.”

This was delivered with a jut of the lower jaw and a fire in the eyes that told me what was likely to follow would be worse than some wasted popcorn. But I couldn’t get rid of the vision of dumping that popcorn in the trash after the ape got shot down from the Empire State Building and we were leaving the theater. My years of surviving the Great Depression made such behavior impermissible.

So I tried one last time to reason with her.

When I finished, she said in a kind of steely calm, “I can’t believe you’re telling me that I can’t have my own bag of popcorn. Are you trying to save money? Or just being ridiculously stubborn? I’m hungry. I want my own popcorn. Will you please get it for me?”

This was clearly her final position. My options at that point were to dissolve the marriage or buy her a bag of her own. I had time to think it over before we got up to the counter, and I was able to accept her demand with reasonable grace by being mad as hell at Regal Theaters for putting me in this position by not offering a legitimate small bag of popcorn to its customers.

I allowed her to order her own “small” bag, while I pondered having none at all. When her popcorn came, the price remained five bucks, but the bag -- although still way oversized for “small” -- wasn’t as large as I remembered. I believe firmly that since we had last done the sharing number, they had cut the size but not the price. Sherry says that is ridiculous, that it was the medium size we shared.

So I got my own small bag, ate about half of it, and ruined any desire for dinner. Our relationship was distant until about halfway through the movie, when those giant crabs started eating people and she reached over for my hand.

After the movie, I made a show of pouring my popcorn remains into the trash, but if she noticed, she didn’t comment. I don’t remember the rest of the night.

Nor am I sure of the moral of this story.

When Sherry brought it up at our first post-popcorn cocktail hour, she was more puzzled than angry.

She said the issue was quite clear. Regardless of how funky I might have regarded her demand, it was what she wanted, and that should have been the end of it. She considered my feelings in the matter irrelevant, and she was appalled that this simple request had turned somehow into a debate.

Since I had already tried reason, I decided to make light of all this by pointing out that there might be a generational problem here. While my generation was thrifty, decried waste and resented being ripped off, her generation tended to be profligate, wasteful, willful and easily exploited.

She didn’t rise to the bait, but took it properly as a peace offering, and we left the matter there.

I suppose the only moral to be drawn from all this is how quickly piffle can be escalated to absurdity -- and that we will approach future popcorn decisions with this new awareness. As I write this, we’re planning to go to our first movie since “King Kong” today -- once again at 4 o’clock. After we made these plans, Sherry was off to a lunch appointment. But as she was getting into her car, she said: “I’m having a large lunch, so I’m not going to want any popcorn.”

I probably won’t either. And if I think about this issue at all, it will be to wonder at Regal’s profit margin on popcorn and why we don’t pop some at home and bring it to the theater. That way, we could save tons of money and each have our own made-to-size bag.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column appears Thursdays.

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