Secret Secrets Are No Fun...
In which I reveal a twenty year old secret that no longer matters—if it ever did.
It’s 10:14 pm on Saturday night as I type this. I just got home from dinner with friends, and turned on the TV. Staring back at me was Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka, and it triggered a memory that I haven’t thought about in 20 years.
I still have linear cable like a true Gen X’er (even though I don’t think I am?1), and I like to have random shows playing in the background while I do stuff around my apartment. Tim Burton’s CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY was on TBS, and I have seen this movie twice in my entire life, but not since the week it came out in theaters.
In the summer of 2005, I had a crush on a girl that worked at a coffee shop2. We were talking one day, and somehow this movie came up. It wasn’t coming out for a few more weeks, but we were SO excited to see it. We both had great memories of the original from our childhoods, and were both fans of Roald Dahl’s books. I was going to be on tour the week it came out, but we made a plan to see it as soon as I got home.
Technically, this would be the second movie date with this girl. The first… did not go well. The winter before, we saw the movie CLOSER on a double date. If you’re unfamiliar, CLOSER stars Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, Jude Law, and Natalie Portman3. It is a brutal portrait of failing relationships, and everyone in it is a terrible person. It made her so sad, that when the movie ended she broke up the double date, and made her friend drive her home. It was one of the worst first date movies possible.
As a quick aside, my other two “Worst First Date Movies That We Saw In the Theater” are the heroin horror story REQUIEM FOR A DREAM and the Michael Fassbender sex addiction movie SHAME. All three times, the girl picked the movie, and all three times the movie absolutely ruined their night.
Anyway. Tour went mostly well, and we were three days away from coming home, when one of the shows fell apart at the last minute. With nothing to do on a rainy night in San Diego, the consensus was to see a movie. There was only one thing playing that everyone wanted to see, and it just so happened to be starting at the perfect time—CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. I tried to talk them into seeing literally anything else (not telling anyone the real reason, of course), but their minds were made up, and there weren’t any other options that would work out time-wise. I promised this girl that I wouldn’t see it without her, and I hated that I was about to break a promise. I did it anyway, and we headed into the theater.
Words are not enough to describe how I felt leaving the theater. I hated this movie. I hated it so much that for the next three days, all I could think about is how I would have to sit through it for a second time very, very soon.
When I got back to Salt Lake, my first stop was the coffee shop. She was excited to see me, but even more excited that it was time to see the movie. We went that night, and I relived the bubbly technicolor nightmare all over again. When the lights came up, the first thing out of her mouth was, “I kinda hated it.”
I was relieved that she felt the same way, but a little bit sad that I couldn’t warn ahead of time without admitting that I broke a promise. So I kept my mouth shut. For twenty years.
I kept that secret until just now. It doesn’t matter anymore, of course. Things never worked out with us anyway, and I doubt she even knows that this newsletter exists, let alone reads it4. She’s got two kids, a husband, and a whole life to think about.
I have twenty year old memories triggered by randomly seeing Johnny Depp and his weird haircut on TBS one Saturday night. You might think that I gave the movie another chance in 2025 and changed my mind, but you’d be wrong. I’ve seen it twice, which is two times too many.
I was born in 1980, which according to the internet is the weird year between Gen X ending and the birth of the Millennials. And we know the internet would never lie about anything, so…
Some things never change.
This Natalie Portman image with pink hair and the caption “Lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off” might have been the most popular reposted image on peak Tumblr.
If I’m being totally honest, I’d be shocked if she’s even thought about me one single time since that summer.
This was a fun read haha