Whistleblower

A long holiday break is the perfect time to go to the movies. Normally, we are too busy on the weekends throughout the year with activities and impromptu trips and birthday parties to go see movies on any kind of regular basis. When we do find time, we can’t seem to find anything worth seeing, as the good movies are released only in summer or over the holidays. The movie industry is fully aware that no one goes to the movies the rest of the year, so it saves the good stuff for those four months, emptying our pockets at the exact time when any extra dough has already been earmarked for travel or gifts.

A few days after Christmas, my sister, LM, was in town for a quick holiday visit.  We decided to see “Saving Mr. Banks,” a movie about Walt Disney acquiring the rights to the story of “Mary Poppins” from the story’s creator, Mrs. P. Travers, a woman who was apparently a bit of a bitch. We took my younger daughter, S, along with us, as she too appreciates a darkened theater and a bucket of popcorn. We all three wanted to see the movie even though none of us particularly likes “Mary Poppins,” what with all the singing and the odd British references and the hour too long part. We do like Tom Hanks, though, and Walt Disney and period pieces, and LM had dumped a box of Raisinets on top of the popcorn, so things were already looking to be swell.

Now, spoiler alert: this is not an action movie. S didn’t really get most of what was going on, as she tends to be a concrete, literal thinker, but LM and I were having a splendid time, followed by some tears, us, not S, followed by the need for a wad of tissues and digging in the bucket for the last chocolate covered raisin. In addition to some fairly emotional moments, the movie was also chock full of musical tidbits, the kinds of scenes that leave you humming on your way out of the theater. We enjoyed ourselves tremendously.

After the over two hour movie ended, S made a beeline for the restroom while LM and I continued to gingerly dab at our eyes. We decided to drown our sorrows in a quick romp to the after Christmas insanity that is Target. I do believe Target is more crowded after Christmas than it is before. I understand the joy that comes with seventy percent off wrapping paper, but seriously, folks, is it worth fighting for a parking space? We had an actual purpose for going there, seeing as S has blown her nose in every Kleenex in my house and has worked her way through the entire box of Mucinex. Also, I needed more gift tags for next year.

When we finally got inside, LM and I both realized that we also needed to use the restroom. She got the last empty stall, so I waited patiently for my turn. I could hear my sister humming in the bathroom stall. It didn’t sound like any of the “Mary Poppins” songs, but what did I know? It didn’t make any sense to me that my sister would be humming a nursery rhyme, but there she was, humming away as she peed, and it sure as shit sounded like something straight from Mother Goose.

After she left the stall, I entered and then had a twenty second debate with myself: to paper or not to paper? Normally, in public, the answer is always “yes, to paper,” but my sister just used this particular toilet, and I knew she would have put down paper before me. So was it necessary? There would still be the germs present from the thousands of restroom goers before her, so yes, paper it was. I am not one of those inconsiderate squatters who think they are all that, you know, the ones who end up pissing all over the seat for us paperers to discover. That forces you to mop up someone else’s pee with a giant wad of toilet paper, then flush it, leaving those in line waiting on you to think you are doing the courtesy pre flush before you blow it up in there, when in actuality, you are cleaning up a perfect stranger’s piss so you can start the papering process all over again.

Anyway, I peed, I flushed, I washed my hands, and I left the bathroom. My sister and daughter waited right outside the door, and when they saw me, they burst into song. The song was “Knick, Knack, Paddy Whack,” the nursery rhyme my sister was just humming in the bathroom. Also, they didn’t burst into song; just my sister did. My daughter looked at the floor waiting for the hole to appear, the one she was praying for to swallow her up.

“So that’s what you were whistling!” I said to her. “I couldn’t recognize that song from the movie we just saw, but it did sound familiar.”

“I wasn’t whistling,” she said. “It was that other lady in there.”

“That wasn’t you just whistling in the bathroom? Seriously? That wasn’t you? I totally thought that was you!” I laughed.

“Hell no!  What, do you think I’m crazy? That was some other weirdo whistling ‘Knick Knack Paddy Whack.’”

“She’s just the weirdo singing it,” S said under her breath.

“Yeah, I tried to get this one to join me,” my sister pointed in my daughter’s direction, “but she wouldn’t do it.”

“I don’t know why you wanted me to sing in public outside of the bathroom, that’s why,” S said to her.

“I wanted you to do it because it was going to be funny,” she said.

“Trust me, it was,” I told them both.