Where do I begin?

Last night I took Hannah to the 7:45 p.m. showing of High School Musical 3. It was the opening night and I knew that the whole weekend would be crazy but I never imagined it would be anything like this.

Hannah and I arrived at the theater around 6:45 p.m. Surprisingly the parking lot had quite a few open places considering that there was also a 7 p.m. showing of HSM3. We walked in, collected our pre-purchased tickets, and went up to concessions. Once again the line was surprisingly short and we were 2nd in line. We got our two sodas and a popcorn and went over towards Theater #9.

When the man tore our tickets we were directed to a rope line. This didn't surprise me and I figured that even with the movie playing in multiple theaters the previous showing wouldn't be done yet. There was one lady in line with her two kids around Hannah's age. This was about 6:52 p.m. Less than 5 minutes later the real rush began and probably 20-30 people arrived to get in line. What was interesting was that they were coming in huge groups where there were probably 3 mothers and then at least a dozen children. The kids ranged from Hannah's age through early teen. A few older teen girls were there and dragging their boyfriends who were definitely hating standing in line with children to watch a movie that they didn't even want to see in the first place.

Around 7 p.m. the previous showing started emptying out of the theater and the cleaning crew went in to clean. They seemed to disappear into a black void. It took forever for them to clean that theater. The line was getting longer and longer and even though we were at the front of the line it had gone all the way to the back wall and was starting to wind back up on both sides of the original line. Hannah did great. She wasn't whining or complaining and luckily I had been smart enough to tell her to bring a book with her. She stood in line and read her book and was as content as could be.

Around 7:15/7:20 people were definitely starting to get restless wondering what was taking so long to clean the theaters. The line just kept getting longer and longer (and louder and louder - there were a LOT of kids there). At about 7:25/7:30 two mothers walked up with about a 1/2 dozen pre-teen girls (or more) and tried to talk the high school kid tearing tickets into letting them go in before everyone else even though they had just arrived. He said no and directed her to the line where she clumped all her girls together and appeared indignant (and downright bitchy) when parents were grumbling about her trying to cut in line. At this time the lines on both side of the original line were now wrapped all the way around so that the people at the end of each wrapped line were equal with the front of the original line. THAT is how insane it was. For the most part I was just taking it all in and was pretty amused. Hannah was being an angel so I certainly wasn't stressing out and I actually find people watching pretty entertaining. I was looking forward to finally being able to set the soda and popcorn down though. My biggest concern, at this point, was that we actually were at the front of the line and that Hannah would get trampled. I don't doubt that before this weekend is over some small child in America will be the victim of HSM3 crowds.

At this point it was almost 7:35 and the movie was scheduled to start in 10 minutes but they still hadn't finished cleaning the theater and let us in. One of the fathers who was at the end of the line actually stepped out to talk to management and said that he was worried about the rush of kids and hoped that someone would be around to make sure the line would be released in an orderly fashion based on arrival. The funny thing is that he was at the "end" of the line directly to my right and he was less concerned about getting in and getting a good seat then about the safety of all the children while the mom at the "end" of the line to my left was the one ready to trample all the small children to get her 6 pre-teen girls in first.

Luckily the management took heed of the gentleman saying there was going to be a stampede and came over to release the original line first. Of course, since the ends of the line were now equal to the front of the line it could easily have been a mad rush. And it almost was. As he released the center line (the front of the original line) the lady to my left said "this is ridiculous" and started to push her 6 kids to go. At that point the mom behind me, who had a gaggle of her own girls with her, yelled "Oh no you don't" and threw out her arm in front of the other group. It was pretty funny but I didn't stick around to watch. I was just concentrating on getting Hannah into a seat without being trampled. Even without all the lines being released at once there were 6 girls behind us going into the theater that really wanted the back row, started to run, and almost ran over Hannah to get there. Luckily they noticed her and said to me "don't worry....we won't trample her...we doubt you're heading to the back row anyway."

All in all everyone was in their seats before the movie started 10 minutes later and there were actually empty seats left in the theater. The movie was good although not as good as the first two. The opening shot is of Zac Efron's character, Troy, and it's a close up of his face so all the girls in the audience screamed. I'm pretty sure those boys that were escorting their girlfriends were hating every minute of it but hey, those girls are doing good to have their boyfriends so well trained so early in life.