Inner Ramblings: Waiting For Batman

Thursday, July 19 2012 - Inner Ramblings - by: nny_42

I adore Batman. Heck, sometimes *growl* I AM Batman. In fact while you read this, assuming you read this late Thursday, odds are I am waiting on a line with other over excited fan boys waiting to watch The Dark Knight Rises. What's important is that I will be watching this relatively close to home and I am fairly certain that I am not going to end up in the middle of the woods waiting for a train that will never come. I'll explain.

A few weeks before The Dark Knight Premiered they had a bunch of events promoting it. I got EXTREMELY involved with the viral marketing for The Dark Knight. Me and my best friend ran all over the streets of New York (with several other hundred people) on a scavenger hunt for clues left by "The Joker" who sent them in pizza boxes At 10 o'clock the pizza got here. At 10:01 a mob was born. Why were we running? No one knows, I just knew we were easily a few hundred strong, running and screaming through the streets of Gotham. Weaving in and out of traffic. Some knocking over pedestrians, others knocking over themselves as we raced through the city hall and to a food court were someone read directions and people chanted numbers.

The point is I didn’t know what was happening, I’m not sure anyone did but there was a great sense of "well where doing this for fun, were doing this for BATMAN!!".  Many of this mob was already clad in spiffy shirts handed out ahead of time. I wasn’t so lucky. I was in a worn and torn Batman shirt I was likely going to pass out in because I had been jogging from one end of the city to the next.

Everyone was a buzz as to what the prize for this insane scavenger hunt would be. Free tickets? If we were lucky. The very least I was going to get was a damn free shirt. while people were confusingly shouting conflicting directions in the park I finally caught up with my best friend, who got not one but two of the spiffy free shirts, and was chatting up a friend she had made . I paused to think of how totally awesome this was running around NYC aimlessly in the name of Batman. Well technically the Joker due to the amount of chaos we as a giant mob caused, but I was in it for Batman.

So we’re about to jump on the Brooklyn bridge for no good reason, when someone points out we are apparently heading in the wrong direction. well played over excited mob, well played. We were going to keep running till we hit the Canadian border apparently. Or west Nyack, but I'm getting ahead of myself. at this point the mob, tired, sweaty, and only casually strolling now because they learned their lesson about running everywhere, files back to some park not all that far away from where we were in the first place. in fact I'm sure we jogged like 8 miles in the complete opposite direction. I was tired sweaty, sort of confused and defeated, but cracking jokes as was the rest of the mob. waiting for something, anything to happen and I see it and I'm immediately a drooling fanboy.

I turn to my best friend and her new friend for their reactions but they don’t see it. I run into the crowd and grab my friend , unable to form words just lots of annoying grabbing at her arm and pointing up at the sky slack jawed with twinkle in my eye like a little kid. It was the bat signal. THE FREAKING BATSIGNAL shinning on the top of a skyscraper , looking epic as hell. everyone’s in awe and taking pics. I hear someone behind me go "idk wtf is going on but I just got a shirt!" seems while everyone was distracted a lone guy was handing out shirts and being generally ignored. I rushed him, got my shirt (in XL but it didn’t matter, I got one finally) pointed others in the direction of the guy with the shirts. It was awesome. it was epic.

DARK KNIGHT is going to be beyond all description and I was just insanely excited for the movie. Then about a few days later there was another clue based game on the website that, once figured out, scored me free tickets to see it in Imax, give or take a week before it was out. I spazed out. I went completely nuts. However it wasn’t till much later when it hit me. I am not even remotely sure just WHERE this screening is, exactly. I have no idea where West Nyack is but Google is telling me its INSANELY far away from Jersey.

This was going to be a journey. I really should have thought this out more. These sort of things never turn out well for me. But my friend insisted that this would work out, we would find a train that would get us there, that everything would work out. So I started to believe it. I was wrong. After what was nearly the longest train ride of my life, we then took a reasonably long cab ride to the mall were the super secret advanced screening was to be held. And by super secret I mean, EVERYONE was wearing Batman shirts and or costumes so there was nothing else this line could have been for.

So I got to watch The Dark Knight a week before everyone else did. Hilariously I remember thinking that I should be Nurse Joker For Halloween that year because *nobody* was going to do that and was later promptly annoyed when every 2nd person was some form of Dark Knight Joker that year. But I loved it and fresh out of the theater and swearing not to spoil it, we took another reasonably long cab ride to the train station to wait for the last train heading back. And wait. An wait. It never arrived. Now train stop I should note was basically disconnected from society. It was the tracks, a strip of seats and woods, nothing else. So eerie it was that we had started to joke around about zombies or serial killers and how we were going to be attacked, when an extremely shady looking fellow dragging a duffle bag filled with lord knows what shuffled out of the woods. We were dead silent. No one broke eye contact as he slowly shuffled and dragged an overstuffed duffle bag past us. For a moment I thought “what would batman do?” and contemplated growling something intimidating in my best batman voice to scare him off, but it hit me that even Batman would know when it's best to shut up and just let the psycho drag his suspicious bag into the other side of the wood sat 4 am in the morning.

I'm sure a bunch of 20 something’s wearing batman shirts and hanging out at the train stop looked just as suspicious to him, because not long after a cop car came and did absolutely nothing to help. “yea wear just..um waiting on a train?” and he shrugged and told us to keep off the trains, and was done with it. W e eventually got home but it was seriously the biggest ordeal ever. And I want to say I have learned from that but honestly , it became the start of a trend of me getting trapped in the middle of nowhere just because I opted to trust a train schedule. I wasn’t fortunate to get into any preview screenings this time ,but if it means I get all the fun of getting to line up dressed as batman and actually make it home without incident this time than so be it.