when harry met sally at the dentist
Is it that obvious that I have a crush on Filmosophy? (Or does two links-in-one-week say more about Meg Ryan than it does about Filmosophy?)
Anyway – as previously mentioned, all this week Filmosophy is reviewing Meg Ryan movies. Today they did When Harry Met Sally. And since sharing is caring, I’ll share my own story about that movie. You can thank me later.
First, something you must know: I hate the dentist. Hate thinking about the dentist, hate going to the dentist, hate being at the dentist. I even hate the feeling of really smooth teeth after being at the dentist, because…you guessed it…it reminds me that I was just at the dentist.
So I’m at the dentist. And I have to have some procedure done that involves cotton balls and mouth guards and needles and drills and other shiny metal tools. But! Because my dentist is a wonderful person (really, she is, highly recommend her – I don’t hate her, per se, just her profession) she recognizes how much I hate this platonic dentist ideal, and agrees to dose me with a horse’s quantity of nitrous oxide.
God bless her.
And after the mask’s been on for a few minutes, the nurse (dental assistant? Whatever, I’m high at this point) asks if I’d like to watch a movie while my mouth is being excavated. I try to make a joke about “If I had known there was a DVD player I would have brought my own” but the mask was on and I was slurring my words pretty heavily. The DVD case was slim, so When Harry Met Sally it was.
Fast forward about 15 minutes. The movie’s queued up, I’ve had more of the nitrous, my gums have been shot full of Novacaine and they’re sharpening the drill bit on my molar. Harry and Sally get into the car for their roadtrip and Billy Crystal proceeds to spit sunflower seeds all over the inside of the passenger window because he had forgotten to roll it down.*
And I laugh. Out loud. Through the cotton balls and the mouth guard and the Novacaine and the nitrous and the drilling. And my dentist, God bless her, pauses to pull the drill out of my mouth, looks at me and says “Yeah, you’re doing fine.”
And that’s my When Harry Met Sally story.
* I love that moment in the film. (Much more than the tedious “can men and women be friends without sex getting in the way” conversation that follows; duh, of course not.)