Pizza and Movie Night

For the better part of a decade, Friday nights have been pizza and movie night at our house. For us humans, the ritual includes choosing which flick to see, grabbing pizza and salad to go from a local pizzeria, and sitting together in the living room, munching our dinner while we watch our film.

The ritual is eagerly anticipated by the dogs. They probably refer to Friday nights as pizza crust and crouton night. And maybe, everybody's-in-the-living-room-together -and-on-winter-nights-there's- a-fire-and-it's-warm-cozy-and-snuggly night.

The rule about movies is that we have a family movie – that means one we all watch together – and it can only be rated G or PG, since the youngest family member is only eight years old. Sometimes this requirement generates a fair amount of whining from the teenager. "Why do I have to watch that dumb movie? My friends all watch R-rated movies." Compassionately, I usually answer, "Oh, well."

I feel strongly about this together time even if it is begrudged on occasion. I can't see us each deposited in separate rooms, staring distantly at separate screens. On movie night, we share a common experience – we laugh, we cry, we're scared, even bored. But we do it together.

We have the common experience of drooling dogs staring us down, willing us to hand over pizza before it's down to the crust, whining at us to abandon all of our Caesar salad croutons to our poor pitiful canines. And then we snuggle in to be entranced by orphaned geese, polar bears, or ravens; to watch kids triumph over grown-up efforts to spoil a park, knock down an old house, or ruin a natural habitat. Foster kids always find a loving home and the animals (almost) always get rescued.