My worst trip to the movies.

Since I go to the movies at least once a week, it's fun for me when the individual viewing experiences stick out in my head. My best trip to the movies, which I can relate another time, was going to see "The Silence of the Lambs" by myself at age 14. The most fun I've ever had with friends in a movie was the screening of "Crossroads" at Mall of Georgia with Doug and a lighter-waving Kacoon two years ago.

Trying to think up my worst trip to the movies, I racked my brain for memories of bad moviegoing experiences. (This isn't about seeing a bad movie. It's about a bad theater experience, like when the theater once switched reels on me and showed me the end of "Needful Things" before the middle or when I went to see "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" last year with Edmondson and that drunk woman behind us was singing the theme song over and over and playing horsey-ride in her chair.)

The worst trip to the movies that I can remember was seeing Milos Forman's "The People Vs. Larry Flynt" at the AMC Colonial 18 in Lawrenceville, Ga.

I'm just sitting there, watching and enjoying the movie, when a dateline comes up onscreen to introduce a scene.

"Lawrenceville, Ga."

People started applauding, and then I remembered what happened to Larry Flynt in Lawrenceville, which I'd forgotten.

While on trial there, a gunman shot him and left him paralyzed. The gunman was never caught.

So I go looking around the theater for strange people, thinking that the gunman could very well be sitting right near me, while some people kept applauding all through the Lawrenceville segment.

"Yay!," I imagined them thinking. "Our town's the site of a famous shooting!"

It was like sitting in Ford's Theater and watching a play about Abraham Lincoln.