Star Trek-iversary

Happy Mother's Day!  A year ago today, Brandt saw a captioned movie in a theater for the first time.  He isn’t a big movie buff, but he does like Star Trek (yes, we’re geeks!) and I knew he wanted to see the latest movie in the theater.  However, with his hearing loss and no-longer-powerful-enough hearing aids (it was still a few months before he got the new Exelias), he knew he’d never be able to understand the dialogue unless he saw the movie with captioning.

Our nearby Big City didn’t have Open Captioning or Rear Window Captioning at the time, so we had several options—none of which were exactly convenient.  Brandt’s suggestion was simply to wait until the movie came out on DVD, and he would watch it with subtitles.  I immediately rejected this idea, because he was trying to avoid learning anything about the movie before he saw it and that would be practically impossible after waiting several months to see it.  I also didn’t like the idea that he would have to miss out on the big-screen experience because of his hearing impairment. 

The second choice was to drive two hours to our hometown and see it in Open Captioning, which would be offered several weeks after the initial release date.  This was problematic because OC movies are only offered at specific dates and times, and the company couldn’t tell me in advance what those dates and times would be.  Sometimes they only offer a movie in OC during the middle of the week, which would be impossible for us to attend.

Our third choice was to drive four hours in the opposite direction, to the nearest theater offering Rear Window Captioning.  I had been to several OC movies with Josie, but had not been to a RWC movie before.  I asked Louise what she knew about RWC, and she didn’t know much about it either.  The upside of RWC is that it is available during any showtime, because you have a Reflector Panel that you install in the cupholder to capture the text that is displayed on an LCD screen in the back of the theater.  I chose RWC for our dilemma; I bought the tickets online and surprised Brandt by saying “Go get ready fast, we have a looong drive ahead of us!”

I asked the ticket seller where to get our “captioning-viewer-thingies” and was pointed to the manager’s desk.  He fished out two Reflector Panels from a cardboard box and handed them to us.  They were heavy and cumbersome, and I felt very self-conscious as we carried them into the auditorium.  It took longer than I had anticipated to drive there, so there were already about 75 people in their seats.  I had read online that it’s best to sit in the middle of the theater when using RWC, but all those seats were already taken.  Brandt said, “Let’s just find a seat in the back.” 

We tried sitting on the second-to-last row, but couldn’t get the RWC text anywhere in our Reflector Panels from there.  So we moved one row down and sat off to the right-hand side; it worked, sort of.  After a good five minutes of turning and twisting the arms of the panels, we each finally got it in a spot where 1) it would stay put without slowly drooping, and 2) the text, “Welcome to Rear Window Captioning/Please adjust your reflector” was visible—albeit, my text was way over in the upper-left corner of the panel, and Brandt’s was down at the bottom of his panel, several inches away from the screen.  It was far from perfect, but, it was something! 

The first preview didn’t have captioning, which made me nervous.  The Open Captioned movies I’d seen with Josie never had their previews captioned either, but I was still a little worried.  The second preview, for “Up,” was captioned, and I was so excited I hit Brandt on the shoulder.  When the movie itself started, I was bouncing up and down in my seat.  I looked at Brandt at least 20 times throughout the movie, making sure he could still see his captioning and was enjoying the plot.  “Watch the movie, not me!” he whispered.  It was an absolute success; he had a few issues with the alternate plotline, but loved being able to see the movie in the theater, on opening weekend, AND able to understand every word.  I was beaming the whole four-hour car ride back home. 

We didn’t have nearly as a great an experience when we attempted to see the movie again, this time in Open Captioning, with our friends Cassie and Basil.  But that’s a story for another post.

And for you fellow Trekkies, here is a picture of Brandt’s surprise Star Trek groom’s cake, baked and decorated by our very own Josie!