Our plans were for dinner and a movie, and as I’ve mentioned before, the most Original Language screens are at the Sony Center, and Andy’s Sports Bar is the place for a burger in that neck of the woods. “Sports Bar” is a relative term, of course. They did have a couple for small TVs showing Wimbledon highlights and Wrestlemania, but there was no Golden Tee, no obnoxious Frat crowd, and no Ladies Drink Free on the 4th promotion. We tucked in to a small table in the corner and ordered our food and drinks. I am proud to report that I did my patriotic duty and asked for a Miller. I probably have not had a Miller since I was in college. When my tiny screw-capped bottle arrived and I considered it next to Julie’s mouth-watering tap-poured Erdinger it dawned on me that this was a moment created only so that I could post a picture of me with a Miller on this blog.
Was it worth it? I’m not sure that it was. Do we do anything because we want to do it or because we want to tell others about it? Does wanting to memorialize the moment cheapen the experience? Before I could think too deeply about what my motivations for committing beer sacrilege had been, our onion rings arrived. They were served up in standard American fashion – hot, crunchy, greasy, salty… and on a bed of tortilla chips with mayo and salsa on the side. I haven’t enjoyed onion rings so much in a long, long time. The burgers were a little disappointing after such a great opening act. Maybe they would have been better with a Bud Lite.
We paid our bill with about an hour to kill before the start of our movie. Andy’s is literally across the street from the Sony Center, so it was looking like we would have to do some serious people-watching when suddenly the sounds of tiny explosions echoed off of the steel-and-concrete canyons of Potsdamer Platz. I could see flashes of light reflected on the glass windows of a skyscraper on the corner. We may have missed the hot-dog eating contest at Nathan’s, but the Coney-Island fireworks were in full-effect. The fates were smiling on us and I knew there was a reason why I had downed that swill. I doubted that Andy’s had the budget for such things. We found out later that the celebration was coming from just up the road, at the grand opening of the American Embassy on Unter der Linden… what a coincidence! Good thing those contractors had been slow about putting in the marble countertops or they’d have been stuck partying on Cinco de Mayo or something. In any case, we were treated to a terrific thirty-minute show that ended with just enough time for me to wait in line at the concession stand for a bag of Gummi Bears and for us to find our seats.
The cherry on top of our Ugly American night was a film about Ugly Americans – The Ruins. Ugly on the inside, of course. The cast for this adaptation of Scott Smith’s horror-in-the-jungle beach novel is well scrubbed (at least when we first meet them by the pool at a Mexican resort) with perky chests and rippling biceps. I read the book last summer, hoping for a little bit of the magic from A Simple Plan. What I got was the literary equivalent of torture-porn, sprinkled with a dash of survival tale. The movie dispenses with most of the survival tale stuff. It also makes the mistake of trying to make its characters too likeable, which took away some of the joy I’d derived from reading about their suffering in the book version, where they were almost uniformly detestable. I won’t give away the ending (of the book or the movie), but I can tell you that the moral of the story is that if you are a vapid American tourist, stick to the familiar & don’t try to pretend your are interested in the local culture – all those Starbucks are out there for a reason.
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