There’s nothing like a great movie experience. You know when you get there twenty minutes early just in time to use the facilities, get snacks, find the best seat in the house (at least four rows up, dead center), and the line is short, like Nick Cage and Adam Sandler opening weekend short — a veritable movie theater Nirvana, that’s what this is.
You stake your claim. Perhaps you put your jacket and handbag in the seat next to you, you know as a subtle indication that you don’t want the Johnstons and their trough of children, Gummi Bears, Slurpees, and loud-talking nonsense sitting right next to you. They won’t get the message. They never do. Nevertheless, you’re comfortable, you’ve leaned back in your reclined seat, and the armrest is all yours.
Ok. Er, yeah, that’s what you used to do. Well now you should really just pull out the crime scene booties, a hair net, and perhaps a full body rain slicker because going to the movies is like taking a hot bath in someone else’s bathwater! Literally like licking the door handle of a public restroom.
Dr. Philip Tierno Jr., the director of Clinical Microbiology and Immunology at New York University Langone Medical Center, analyzed spot samples taken from the armrests and concession areas of four NYC movie theaters, as reported by Good Day New York.
Do you know what he found?! What can only be described by the good doctor as “gross contamination.”
This is a pure culture of E. coli,” Tierno said, pointing to a Petri dish from the counter top. “There could be any kind of virus there.”
At the AMC theater’s Empire 25 location on West 42nd Street — you may recall this was the home of an infestation of bedbugs leading to the theater’s closing for fumigation — there were 15 heath violations. One of which was for “evidence of mice or live mice present in [the] facility’s food and/or non-food areas.” Yoikes! He also swabbed the “butter button.” You know that little contraption that’s used to spray butter on your popcorn, yeah well, that thing came back with “environmental organisms” with likely the presence of other, potentially harmful bacteria.
Similarly, the “butter button” at the City Cinemas 1, 2 & 3 theater on 3rd Avenue and East 60th Street came back with “fecal organisms and Enterococcus” bacteria. (Man alive, sheesh.) And not to be outdone, after testing the armrests at both, “Yeast was [present], which could be found in feces or vaginally found,” Tierno said. Klebsiella, an intestinal bacteria, was also observed at the AMC location in Times Square.
What, just what?! Hold on just one damn minute. So there is literally poo covering the surfaces of various items that come in contact with your food and your arms at these theaters…along with any number of other unregulated poo instances? That’s a whole lot of “butt” on that butter button. Yes, sure, I know we live in a germ-ridden, mostly filthy environment if you put the entire world under a microscope, but who, just who, is rubbing their nethers and then shamelessly slathering those particles on the “butter button?” It makes me think that some wanton poo-man is just waiting for you to get your popcorn so he can gift the “butter button” with some of his primo ass-sauce. Is nothing sacred? Can you not just enjoy your pseudo-butter/greasy trans fats in relative peace? Apparently, no. There’s poo to ingest. Nice.
Only one of the four theaters came back with what Tierno describes as “insignificant” amounts of bacteria. Bay Plaza AMC Theatres in the Bronx has this honor. But after 43 health violations lobbed against them last November, one would hope that they’ve cleaned up their act.
Of course each of the main offenders recounted here have offered some sort of PR riddled statement, “We at the blah-blah theater consider the cleanliness of our theaters a high priority, blah, blah, safe environment, sorry you were unsatisfied, blah, and we’re working to blah, blah.”
Whatever.
But really, just clean up the poo.
