At the movie in Asheville, people laughed at all the wrong things. Rather they laughed when I least expected them to or laughed at things I didn’t find funny, and didn’t laugh at all at the things I laughed at.
After the movie—a sweet, somewhat comic cinematic tale of teenagers and their cultural/sexual identities that caused me to wonder afterward ‘what did I just see?’ though not in the same way seeing a Bergman film, for instance, always causes me to think ‘what did I just see?’—I wondered: is ‘Booksmart’ one word or two?
Walking to the RV after the movie, a sudden downpour shifted everything in my thinking. Maybe the movie had more information for me than I thought it had, and that by seeing it again I’d understand why the people had laughed at things I hadn’t found funny and why I had laughed at things they hadn’t.
The Sunday New York Times—the first we’ve been able to procure on our cross-country trip which began in late April—purchased at a Starbucks Coffee shop in Asheville, NC, June 9, 2019. The Times was kind enough to pose for a photo on the dashboard of our RV. Photo by author.