We hardly ever go to the movies. Not that we don’t love them. I think three obstacles stand in our way:

1. Usually, we don’t like the same kind. Bill enjoys the usual guy flicks (vengeance! action! sci fi!) while I favor relationship movies. We both adore comedies.

2. If one of us is free to go, the other already has plans.

3. By Friday night, we are too exhausted to drive out of town if the Gibson doesn’t have what we want to see.

But during a spring weekend that just kept getting drearier and drearier until we couldn’t stand it any longer, Bill and I got out of town. We drove to Indianapolis, grabbed some books and magazines at Borders, ate at Friday’s, then moseyed over to the Indiana State Museum to watch “U23D.”

As the lights dimmed and we donned gray oversized glasses, we giggled like a couple of schoolkids. (My hefty margarita and Bill’s couple of scotches over dinner may have had something to do with that.) Bill said we should have had eyewear that matched lead singer Bono’s distinctive sunglasses.

I had never been to a 3-D movie before. When a shark movie was being previewed, I thought I was going to swallow the school of fish swimming toward me. When the movie credits started floating toward me, I worried I was going to be decapitated by graphics.

I have never been to a live U2 concert before, but this had to be a close second. A couple of times it was as if Bono was singing to me – and only me. Plus he appeared to be a row away. I would forget this was a movie and not live and I wanted to applaud at the end of each song.

As the crowd in the documentary cheered, their arms jerked up right in front of us. I really wanted to fake out the people behind us by throwing my arms up, too, one grasping a lit-up cellphone, but I restrained myself.

Last month I was hell-bent on watching “Sex and the City.” I had followed the antics of Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte all those years on HBO and wanted to see what they were up to now.

So at noon Saturday, May 31, I bought a frozen Coke and buttered popcorn and hunkered down by myself at the Wolf in Greensburg. It is rare that I go to a movie by myself, but I was ready for a little weekend escapism.

The all-female audience (except for an 85-year-old man at the end of my row .... hmmmm) sat through 20 minutes of previews. The last one had voices, but no video. I thought it was a very different, dramatic preview, until I realized there was a machine malfunction. Soon the lights came up and a teen worker started to say, “I have some bad news for you ...”

To be funny, I wailed, “NOOOOOOOO!” The projector light had failed and would take awhile to be fixed. The showing was canceled and we could get refunds at the front.

Women who had driven from farther than Batesville were griping about the price of gas. Luckily, I had also come to Greensburg to get my sunglasses fixed, watch battery replaced, pick up dry cleaning and shop at Wal-Mart so it still wasn’t a wasted trip for me.

The theater manager gave us each a coupon to use at another showing of a movie out longer than two weeks plus a refund. They even offered money back on concessions, but I didn’t take that. My popcorn was halfway gone. As I exited, a woman said to me kindly, “Try to enjoy the weekend.” Then it dawned on me. My outburst had unsettled some in the audience. They thought I was going to go postal, maybe yank a gun out of my purse.