A Night Of Misadventures Featuring Dave Matthews

So, to round out our DMB-Inspired Achievement, we decided to pair it up with #36, our Dave Matthews movie night. If you weren’t aware, Mr. Matthews is quite the versatile guy, and when he’s not writing and performing the best music of all time, he’s also acting in movies and running some wineries. (He’s apparently BFFs with Adam Sandler, so you get to see some totally awesome Dave Matthews bit parts in most recent Adam Sandler movies.)

The plan was to order a bottle of wine from one of the two wineries Dave is a part of, and watch a couple of movies that he’s in. To top the night off, I decided I would make some cornbread, in honor of the song we love so dearly (and because I don’t know how to make alligator pie, which is the only other food song I could think of by DMB).

The night started off fine. I put together a nice box of Jiffy cornbread, since we all know that I’m not the finest in the kitchen.

And Jon, who works in Ohio, ordered a bottle of Blenheim Vineyards Syrah. The night was shaping up quite well!

After we had the cornbread and the wine ready to go, it was time to get the movies ready. We had decided on two Dave movies, Because of Winn Dixie and Where the Red Fern Grows. A few months back, when we were initially making plans for this movie night, we checked on Netflix and saw that both movies were available. Just as a backup, we saw a copy of Because of Winn Dixie for $5.99 and bought it.

…or so we thought.

We loaded up the Netflix instant queue, and much to our surprise… the two movies are now available only on DVD. We had just cancelled our DVD subscription in the past week, since we’d been holding onto the same copy of Finding Nemo for about four months without watching it.

But, never fear, we thought. We’ve got a backup copy in Winn Dixie. So, I started scouring our two DVD cabinets for it. It wasn’t in the proper alphabetical order (I am super anal retentive about my CDs and DVDs being organized), but I thought, maybe there wasn’t room, and it was just tossed in somewhere else. I dug through each and every shelf of DVDs, and nowhere could I find the movie. Apparently, we had walked past this same copy of the movie in the store several times and thought, “Oh yeah, we’ll pick that up in time for the movie night,” and somehow, both Michael and I thought we had already done it.

At this point, it was about 9:15 on Saturday night. So, Jon and I did the only logical thing, which was to race into the car and head down to the local Best Buy to find the movies.

This would have been a fine idea except that… Best Buy didn’t have either one. Here is a list of other places that we went in search of the movie:

Target
Giant Eagle
The Record Exchange (we called them, and they did have it… but were closing in 5 minutes)

Finally, as a last-ditch effort, once the other stores around us had closed, we headed to the 24-hour WalMart about twenty minutes from the house. There, we dove into a gigantic bin of random DVDs. The bin was about three feet in diameter and three feet deep. Oh, and things were everywhere, and when I asked the Walmart electronics department employee if she could look in the computer to save us the drama of searching for something that wasn’t there… she told us their computers were down, and had been broken for over a week.

So, we dug and dug. The worst part was that we kept finding things that would give us hope, like eight thousand copies of some horse movie called Flicka. And then there was Fried Green Tomatoes, and a digitally remastered Fern Gully. And we kept thinking, if those movies were there, surely the movies WE wanted were, too!

Things reached an all-time low when we unearthed a large pile of Where the Red Fern Grows 2 (how they made a sequel after the dogs die in the end of the original, I shall not understand), and the old 1974 version which, while probably quite accurate and charming, did not star Dave Matthews and therefore did not meet the criteria of the movie night.

Finally, I was able to pull up the Walmart.com web page from my phone and look up the movie, where I was informed that ‘this product is not available in store.’ And then, miraculously, we found a triple-feature family dog movie DVD with Winn Dixie on it.

So, at 11pm, after two hours of searching, I spent $13.00 on a DVD that would have cost me $5.99 if I’d been prepared. And now I have to admit that I own a copy of Marley and Me, which I did watch and did not like (but that’s a topic for a different blog).

We arrived home, took the DVD out of the wrapping, and prepared to settle in for a single movie night, instead of the double-feature we’d been planning on. It was at this point that both Jon and I remembered that magical feature that comes with your cable box called “On Demand.” Maybe this was a chance to make it a double-feature after all!

Imagine our surprise, then, when the only movie out of our chosen two that was available On Demand was… Because of Winn Dixie. At $2.99, instead of $13.00.

(Michael just shook his head at us at this point, I might add 🙂

At the very least, the Jiffy cornbread was quite tasty once we warmed it up and buttered it. What I’d love, in the future, is honey butter, but I don’t have the slightest clue how to make that (anyone want to share a recipe?).

Because of Winn Dixie was surprisingly fun. It had great child acting, interesting characters, a cute dog, and best of all, Dave Matthews was in it. And he played music. And he carried a jar of pickles. And I couldn’t stop laughing when he carried the jar of pickles, because all I could think about was Tom Hanks getting his hand stuck in a pickle jar.

Lucy was just happy for an excuse to wear her Beauford #41 shirt (she loooooves that shirt for some reason), and she really enjoyed licking everyone’s cornbread plates.

The Blenheim Syrah was also a pleasant surprise. Since it’s a southern wine (vineyard in Charlottesville, VA), I was expecting it to be very fruit-heavy and sweet. But the balance was quite nice, especially for such a young wine (2010), and I will say for sure that if we find ourselves in C-Ville for another show (and another scenic drive through the Monongahela National Forest, as we had in our last trip to see DMB back in 2009), a stop at Blenheim will definitely be on the agenda!

At the end of the night, we decided to have a Dave Matthews Movie Night Part Two in 2012, where we will watch Where the Red Fern Grows (because I am ordering it online TODAY), and have wine from Dave’s OTHER winery, Dreaming Tree Wines (which we will be able to pick up when we go back out to Central Coast in March for ZinFest!)

Oh, and Lucy wants you all to know, that while Winn Dixie is cute, he’s not the only dog who can smile.