She was sick. We were both sick. Not the "Please kill me, I have the flu" kind of sick, just one of those colds that takes you down for the count. Which leaves you with a choice of the lesser of two inconveniences: NyQuil or DayQuil. NyQuil gets rid of all your symptoms in one shot, but it leaves you unconcious while it works. DayQuil lets you stay vaguely aware of your surroundings, so you can enjoy every glorious minute of the "sniffling, coughing, achy-head" symptoms it doesn't quite banish completely. We had opted for the middle ground - DayQuil during the day, NyQuil at night - but it left us hacking, snorkling, half-awake, and a in foul mood.
We huddled silently on the couch, under blankets, watching cable.
Pollyanna, with Haley Mills, came on and neither one of us changed the channel. We didn't give a damn and the remote was too far away. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. I'd seen the movie years before, but watching under the influence made for an entirely new experience. DayQuil Technicolor. Whee!
Spoiler alert! For those of you that haven't seen it, the movie 'Pollyanna' is so agressively cute and perky, lab rats have been known to swallow their own tongues by the point in the movie the titular main character explains about "The Glad Game". Pollyanna learned the glad game from her Dad, who used to point out to her when she felt sad, that at least she was better off than people who had to walk with crutches or some such tripe. Always look on the bright side of life, as it were. I played the glad game myself while watching it: "I'm glad I'm drugged up for this, because if I weren't I'd be beating myself in the head with baseball bat by now."
In any case, she uses this game to turn all the normal, grumpy people in her town into singing, dancing, lunatics. Then during the climax of the movie she falls from a tree and gets paralyzed from the waist down. The next we see of her she's being rolled around in a wheelchair.
Suddenly, my wife, who hadn't moved a muscle in over an hour, leaned forward and bellowed at the screen, "Not so perky anymore, are we? Try playing the glad game now, bitch!"
I laughed until I ran out of breath, tears streaming down my face. Then I coughed until I saw stars.