Lost in Suburbia: And the Academy Award goes to …

“Do you want to see a movie tonight?” asked my husband.

It was a perfectly reasonable question. It was a Saturday afternoon. We had no plans. But having been married to this guy for 20 years, I knew this question wasn’t as innocent as it seemed. There was a hidden meaning. It was actually code for, “Do you want to see that new action movie with lots of special effects, a huge body count and bad guys with fake foreign accents?”

“What did you have in mind?” I asked innocently.

“The new James Bond movie,” he responded.

I snorted to myself. My husband and I have a lot of similar tastes, which is probably one of the reasons we have stayed married so long. But when it comes to movies, we are clearly divided along gender lines. He likes sports-themed films and big action movies, and I like chick flicks. This is not to say that I don’t like an occasional football film or action movie, too. I was actually sitting in an action movie when I went into labor with my son. Truthfully, it’s much easier to have contractions when things are blowing up on screen than when two people are discussing their relationship issues. But I like to mix it up and every once in a while see a good rom-com or foreign film or something that does not include zombies, intergalactic battles, Tom Cruise rappelling off a building, or men in tight spandex superhero costumes. Actually scratch that last one. I’m OK with that.

On the flip side, my husband is not much of a fan of chick flicks. Although he admits that seeing one is a good opportunity for him to catch up on his sleep, most of the time, I have to drag him kicking and screaming with promises of large quantities of Twizzlers to get him to go. Then he will sit in his seat, chewing Twizzlers and looking wistfully at the wall separating the multiplex where sounds of extreme violence and things exploding come from the theater next door.

This being the case, when he asked me to see another action film, he knew that it was going to be a tough sell, so he decided to take a different tack .

“’Skyfall’ is an action movie, but at it’s heart it’s really a love story,” he said.

“How do you figure?” I wondered.

“The movie is about the unresolved relationship between Bond and Miss Moneypenny,” he explained. “It’s really a romance with some action thrown in.”

Having seen a dozen or so other James Bond movies, I was fairly certain this description was about as fitting as calling “The Godfather” a comedy. Although I was impressed that he had obviously put a great deal of effort into this argument, I still wasn’t biting.

“Actually, I had something else in mind,” I replied. “There’s this new baseball movie I think you’d really like that I’d be willing to see.”

“Baseball? Cool! What’s it called?”

“Pitch Perfect.”

Tracy’s new book, “Lost in Suburbia: A Momoir. How I Got Pregnant, Lost Myself, and Got My Cool Back in the New Jersey Suburbs” is now available for PRE-ORDER! To reserve your copy, got to Amazon or any online bookseller.