Midnight Milky Way

I could use this post to tell you about all the movies I've watched since my last entry. I could go into detail about Melisa's going away party at the Asgard on Friday night or the best seats I've ever sat in at Fenway on Monday night, a "prize" for my recent efforts at work. I could tell you about Noah's birthday party, Nameburst and tennis talk with Pat and Rob, or hobbling around Brooklyn on a foot so purple it looked like I'd been stomping grapes. But this Saturday night was much too memorable for me to bore you with any of that.

It all started at Enid's in Williamsburg, where Mark whipped out a few sheets of notebook paper and his trademark crooked-tipped pen and started grilling us for our top five movies. After Mark's friend Nick joined Pat, Rob, Jill, Mark, and me in sharing our likely top fives, I knew this moment couldn't come and go without a game, so I whipped up some rules in the spirit of the VH1 classic "The List," and we protected our favorites and eliminated what we didn't like or hadn't seen until the list was down to five. We put these five in order and moved on to the next bar, where no one had anything on his or her mind but ranking movies six through ten. The predictable and the pretentious alike were case aside in favor of the staples- films a majority had seen and a plurality had enjoyed. We even ranked the list in the spirit of the Paltrowitzes' ersatz sixth place finish at states in '97. The result begged to be published in this space:

1. Dr. Strangelove
2. Notorious
3. Touch of Evil
4. High Noon
5. The General
6. Sinigin' in the Rain
7. Taxi Driver
8. Bonnie and Clyde
9. All About Eve
10. Apocalypse Now

My suggestion to move on to numbers eleven through fifteen was countered almost instantly by the group's overwhelming desire to rank our top five candy bars. We dropped the dead weight and five of us ransacked Brooklyn's convenience stores (long after every establishment in Boston had locked its doors) in search of the perfect chocolate-coated candidates. Unable to find a 5th Avenue, Butterfinger, Nutrageous, or Whatchamacalit (all prohibitive favorites), we settled on ten bars and made our way to the first tavern with an available table.

The first thing a twenty-something learns when attempting to rank candy bars is not how awful chocolate and nougat mix with Bass and Bud, but how misguided we were when we lusted for these sticks of sugar as kids. Rolos take some time to get going. Toblerone is wildly overrated. Zero is worth its name in gold. Oh Henry is a cheap knock-off, a Butterfinger without the crunch. Babe Ruth's rotten corpse would proobably taste better than the Baby Ruth five of us shared but only I could swallow, one which probably reached the convenience store we bought it from when Ruth was still a pitcher. Only a select few bars met our lofty standards. My choice, Snickers, finished third behind Twix and the champion, a unique dark chocolate and caramel blend that proved worthy of Dr. Strangelove status:

the Midnight Milky Way.