40 Year-old Virgin, never ending pasta and a VW Golf

After a day spent taking care of somewhat uninteresting tasks, Amy and I decided to embark on a alte afternoon quest to see "The 40 Year-Old Virgin". Normally going to see a movie doesn't deserve the billing of embarking on a quest. However, in this case, our good friends at Yahoo! movies indicated that the closest theatre showing the film was the UA theatre in Bedford, located somewhere along the Airport Freeway frontage road not too far from Amy's apartment. We drove over to the area where we assumed the theatre to eb and found nothing. A few loops around the 121 and 183 junction and nothing. Apparently this place is very well hidden. So well hidden in fact that we were still looking for it after the listed showtime at the imaginary theatre had passed.

A quick call to Mr. Moviefone at 444-FILM had us heading up to the AMC 30 in Grapevine Mills where a showing was scheduled about 30 minutes later. Having been to this theatre before, we were pretty confident of its existance and our ability to find it. Exiting off of 121, Amy drew my attention to what she termed a crazy little car up ahead in the lane next to us. I looked over and saw, of all things, a 1996 VW Golf Harlequin!

For those of you not in the know, the Harlequin is a VW Golf with body panels in a mis-matched color scheme and is one of the rarest of recent production VW cars, with only 264 leaving the factory, all during the 1996 model year. The Harlequins were created by constructing a set of four VW Golfs, one Chagall Blue, one Tornado Red, one Ginster Yellow and one Pistachio Green, and then swapping body panels between all four of the cars such that no two adjacent body panels have the same color. The result is one of the most riotous production color schemes since the bold two-tones of the 1950s, almost as if the car were made from Lego. The cars also had a special interior with matching multicolored accents on greay cloth. This particular Harlequin looked to be in pretty good shape, although like many of its kind, the green has faded badly and the red had lost some of its pop in its 9-plus years on the road. I wasn't paying close enough attention to determine which of the four Harlequin patterns was present on this example, but it was very cool to see one of these rare and unique cars on the road firsthand for the first time.

After following the Harlequin for a few blocks, we made it to Grapevine Mills for 'The 40 Year-Old Virgin". It lived to its billing and is one of the more clever movies in its sex farce genre, in my opinion. If one thing is for certain it is that I will never be able to discuss bags of sand and whether or not a trunk has enough room for a bicycle ever again without snickering to myself. Time well spent in the theatre.

With our stomachs hurting from laughter, we headed on over to the Olive Garden in Irving for dinner. I did not know ahead of time that Olive Garden had added the "never ending pasta bowl" to its menu, for if I had I wouldn't have had anything for lunch. Nonetheless, I was up to the challenge of hurting their bottom line by eating two plates of spaghetti and finishing about a third of Amy's pasta. Not a bad showing but next time I will be prepared to eat them out of next weeks payroll.