The Sneak vs. the St. Louis International Film Festival, Round Two (Saturday)

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Screenshot: www.cinemastlouis.org
The Sneak makes a rare second appearance this week to continue her adventures at the St. Louis International Film Festival. See Tuesday's column for the first half of Round Two.

Shows: Stolen Lives, the much-hyped feature film starring local boy made mad, Jon Hamm, and Terribly Happy, the Danish Fargo.

Food: Some mysteriously bad beef jerky.

Difficulty: Surprisingly hard. Lines were long and in the open area of Plaza Frontenac in front of the theater, and a sold-out showing of Stolen Lives meant sitting in the very bright, very exposed front row.

The Sneak vs. the St. Louis International Film Festival, Round Two (Friday)

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Shows: Ligeia, a locally filmed, very (very) loose adaptation of the short story by Edgar Allen Poe reimagined as a Gothic thriller; Albino Farm, a slasher film that might as well be about my fears of driving to the Lake of the Ozarks.

Food: The Edgar Allen Pom, a cocktail I concocted, recipe to follow.

Difficulty: Easy. The St. Louis International Film Festival opened soft on Thursday with a single showing of An Education so the true opening night at the Tivoli was packed. I was also able to employ the special thermos my mother got me from the Missouri History Museum -- expressly because she thought it would be good for sneaking. It runs in families, people.

The Sneak vs. the St. Louis International Film Festival

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This weekend, I watched the Breeders' Cup from the hospitable living room of a dear friend, pizza in one hand, PBR in the other, yelling for some very fine horses to beat the spread. That's not particularly sneaky, though sneaking food into horse races is quite enjoyable. The topic of conversation kept coming around to how different the horses, crowd, and track facilities at Santa Anita were from our own dear Fairmount Park. The horses particularly are not the rib-addled, bow-legged, nearly-asleep ones you can take home for two grand from just over the river but rather astonishingly calibrated muscle machines a hundred generations in the making. Herein lies the overarching metaphor:
Sneaking Food Into a Regular Movie : Tuesday at Fairmount Park :: Sneaking Food Into the St. Louis International Film Festival: The Breeders' Cup
The event for which all my sneaking has prepared me -- and, hopefully, better prepared you -- begins this Thursday, November 12. Here are some tips to get you into marathon shape this week.

The Sneak's Google Map Guide to Sneaking Resources

This week, in lieu of her usual sneaking exploits, Dara Strickland provides a map for the aspiring and professional Sneak alike: a guide to sneaking resources and places where you can (should?) sneak.

Zoom out to see all the icons. Click on individual icons for Dara's commentary.




View Sneaky Resources in a larger map
Tags: sneaking

Sneak of the Dead

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Pay attention: In the event of a zombie apocalypse, the information I'm about to give you may be the difference between having your cranium cracked open like the sugar crust on a crème brûlée and parlaying a considerable stash of vodka and ammo into living the good life with a harem somewhere in Montana.

The safest place you can possibly be in the event that hell runs out of space and the dead walk the earth is in a movie theater. Let's discuss.

The Sneak: Sneako Maki

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Dara Strickland
The virtues of sushi as a food are significant, but its value to a sneak may be as elusive as a flying bird's reflection on a rippling pond. I've crafted these handy tables for you to compare the virtues of eating sushi in a restaurant to sneaking it into a movie theater.
                                        Sushi Sensory Input: Sight

In a Restaurant: Preparation is very important to a good chef. Rolls will be punctuated with drizzles of sauce, nigiri displayed in harmonious pairs or fanning out across the plate; chrysanthemum piles of pickled ginger and tiny blobs of wasabi complete the miniature landscape you are about to destroy with your ravening.

Snuck into a Movie: Can't see it. Even if you do, all sushi will look washed out and alarmingly blue-gray, so looking closely is not recommended.

Sneak with a Thousand Faces

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I was raised a Christian sneak, which may have repercussions in my evangelical fervor for spreading the gospel of eating what you want, when you want. One thing that always disappointed me about the Bible as child, though, was that Moses and David and Jesus were hard to understand. I liked Jesus best because he told the best stories -- and, honestly, my parents should have known what I was to become when I was so very interested in turning water into wine or producing loaves and fishes from rarefied air.

I thought the biggest problem with the Bible was that it didn't address my actual concerns, chiefly: What does God eat? How come all the killing's at the front of the book? Seriously, pets go to Heaven, right? What causes seasons?

In the absence of clear answers from the Bible, I filled in myself with mythology. God probably eats ambrosia and all the killing's at the front because it took a long time for Hope to work its way out of Pandora's box. Pets definitely go to heaven, but it's like pet Valhalla where they can run around all day and never get tired before a giant feast. These things were as real to me, as valid, as cosmically understandable as anything in the Bible. I had an admirably ecumenical view of theology.

Out, Damned Sneak!

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Show: St. Louis Shakespeare's cunning blood-n-gore production of Macbeth, a terrific play about terrible people.

Food: Globe Theatre Apple-Hazelnut Tart, baked by yours truly.

Difficulty: Extreme. While the initial sneak phases of repackaging the food in aluminum foil and taking it into the theater were easy, the tart recipe had to be significantly altered to be appropriate for sneaking, and even then its deliciously crumbly crust nearly blew the whole operation. Close quarters and bright lighting in the Grandel Theater also made me feel like I was being impolite by not offering my neighbor a slice.

Apples, pears, oranges, pastries, roasted meat and nuts: all things eaten and/or thrown at the actors during plays at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. A single penny dropped into a wooden box would let you stand in the yard with the rest of the groundlings for the afternoon show in the open amphitheater. Raining? Too bad, and you probably needed a bath, anyway. Illiterate? Join the club. For just a few pence more, you could get an entire meal from vendors wandering around inside the theater or from stalls set up just outside. Truly, it was a golden age of the nexus of eating and entertainment.

Sneakabilly Freakout!

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Show: Unknown Hinson, psychobilly musician/vintage vampire performance artist extraordinaire, in an intimate show at Mad Art Gallery. As an extra-awesome bonus, the fine and talented ladies of the Alley Cat Revue provided a burlesque warm-up with typical wit and inventiveness.

Food: Bread pudding with bourbon sauce from Frazer's Restaurant & Lounge.

Difficulty: Thwarted! The problem, dear Brutus, was not our stars or in ourselves, but in service slower than Johnny Cash's phrasing on "Hurt." More on that in a bit, because it still makes me mad.

To Everything There is a Sneakson and a Time for Every Repurpose

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Late yesterday, the hamsters that power Gut Check went on strike. The dispute has since been resolved. Thus, a special Tuesday edition of the Sneak!

The windows of my house are comfortably open, and Labor Day has passed us by. You know what this means? I mean, aside from being the sartorial solstice, the final waning days of white shoes and seersucker? Summer movie season is over. Jerry Bruckheimer has to go back into his fetid subterranean burrow for another six months of plotting how to rob twelve-year-olds blind with special effects in 2010. Movies have somehow taken on additional weight in the cooling air, like dirigibles ponderously descending to Award Season cruising altitude as the gas inside expands more slowly inside their rippling silk flanks.

Ironically, this is also the only time of year when watching a movie outdoors is actually a goofy pleasure in St. Louis and not a masterclass in places on your body you didn't know could sweat.

A Sneak in the House of Love

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Today, my very dear friend and sneaking companion, Madame H, got married.

Pros: Nobody believes marriage will make her change her sneaky ways. Now that they are flesh of one flesh and therefore sneak of one sneak, I can probably press her husband into happy service as a second set of pockets. He was gifted by nature with something I have been striving to achieve my whole life: an innocent face.

Cons: When you're well known among your friends as a sneak, suspicion that you're hiding food about your person at any and all events grows as effortlessly as cedars on a rocky hillside. As the wedding ceremony, conducted almost entirely in Sanskrit, stretched into its second hour, people started looking at me apprehensively, as if they expected sub sandwiches to spontaneously spring from my handbag.

Sneaks Sans Frontieres

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Show: The Hangover, the caviar of immature-dudes-take-a-Vegas-roadtrip comedies, watched as late as possible in a theater in Vancouver's Chinatown to stay awake long enough to catch a red-eye flight back to the States.

Food: Andres Baby Canadian Champagne, a British Columbian wine of low alcohol content and questionable vintage.

Difficulty
: Surprisingly easy. Even though the movie theater had prominently placed (and polite) signs prohibiting outside food and drink, nobody looked twice at my international sneaking tote. In fact, I was one of the few people in the theater without a backpack.

This past week, I traveled to lovely Vancouver with the Doctor, my long-time mysterious gentleman caller. I was absolutely there on vacation and not, as some insidious rumormongers have suggested, laying low after realizing that the recipe for a solid-state vodka gibson is chemically identical to napalm in an unfortunate conflagration. Never happened. Those scorch marks are a natural phenomenon and should be ignored.

Innovations in Sneaking: The Solid-State Cocktail

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Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons
While I'm constantly amazed at the number of movie theaters in St. Louis that offer beer, wine and decent coffee, there still aren't many places you can enjoy a good cocktail during the show. What's a sneak to do?

1. Pre-mix the cocktail and bring it in a bottle or thermos.

This is all right for simple cocktails, like a screwdriver, but for something more complicated or garnished, this is a poor choice. It's also hard to get an appropriately-sized serving for a two-hour movie.

2. Assemble the cocktail in the theater.

Admirable -- but unnecessarily complicated. I appreciate the panache it takes to carry a cup and separate containers of gin, vermouth and olives into the theater, but I abhor the potential mess and the distraction of projected light transcribing the arc of a silver cocktail shaker in the dark.

3. Go without.

Absolutely unacceptable. A quick perusal through the archives of this blog will shortly inform you that reasonable self-denial is not one of my virtues.

4. Whip up some solid-state cocktails.

Julia Child Haunts the Sneak

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Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons
Julia Child is haunting me.

In full disclosure, I invited her in. I just didn't realize that beloved, deceased TV chefs followed roughly the same rules as vampires. Man, that is going to be no good for Mario Batali. That gentleman has stringent minimum garlic requirements.

Here's the deal: I was going to make a delightful recipe from one of Julia Child's books to sneak into Julie & Julia, the new partial biopic about Julie Powell, a blogger (who later collected her blog as a book) who cooked her way through Julia Child's seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a single year, intercut with scenes of how Julia actually got to be, well, Julia. See what I was doing there? I was going to write a blog about sneaking food into a movie about a book about a blog about a book about making food.

I had prepared charts.

Sneakonomics 101 - Sneakonomies of Scale

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Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons
Recession. Literally, a pulling back a of a surging, forward-moving tide. The moon never considers whether the tide is a good thing or a bad thing, what its ideal point is along the sand. That's a detachment I sometimes envy when considering the other recession. I pore over the newspapers or turn up the calm radio voices, searching for the turning of the tide as fervently as any early navigator with an astrolabe and a chart with the stars delicately limned in the shapes of the gods.

That tide is something I think about a lot as someone who writes about both food and movies. Open your restaurant at the wrong time? Low tide, high and dry in a business that already has a Ginsu-thin margin. Own a movie theater? You grew up on a milk-tale of the Depression making the movies into the entertainment choice of the masses. This is serious business, so please take me seriously when I tell you there is only one way to accurately describe my watchfulness, my sympathetic sorrow, my fearful hope of a rushing return.

My heart is full of the pain of disco.

Sneakeasy, Part 2: A Slice of Pizza, A Life of Crime

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Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons
Show: Drinks at the Flatiron Lounge, Flatiron District, New York, NY.

Food: One deliciously greasy and huge slice of New York pizza.

Difficulty: Medium. Pizza is a messy food with a limited temperature range within which it is fully delicious. Thus, it requires extensive repackaging. While my sneaking tote is generally quite stylish as well as useful, this dressier occasion required a more petite evening bag.

Last week, I took a look at Prohibition's impact on American food culture and on the cult of the celebrity criminal through the lens of Chinese food snuck into Public Enemies. This week I'd like to examine prohibition in general -- with a small "p" -- and why it adds its indelible soupçon of delight to mundane activities.

Last weekend, in St. Louis, I could have done all of the following without driving more than ten minutes, total: drink absinthe, smoke a hookah, take in a burlesque show and go to a speakeasy. This weekend, I was in New York, where the only part of the previous statement that has ever been unusual has been the driving. All of these things are legal in both cities, and all are popular enough to inspire widespread casual enjoyment beyond their loyal subcultures.

What's the attraction? There was much discussion over the weekend. The consensus was that all of these current trends represent the same kind of safe exoticism that Chinese food provided the larger American culture during Prohibition. In each of them exists an exoticism of both place and time as well as the ability to show off unusual knowledge and a sophisticated palate. They are brief jaunts of historical tourism to the sanitized underbelly of other times, drinking Colonial-style hard cider without having to talk to interpreters about the fact that the men who wrote the Constitution owned slaves or having to take your mother to Ye Olde Pub for peanut soup.


Sneakeasy, Part 1: Public Enemies and Wei Hong Bakery

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Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons
Show: Public Enemies, director Michael Mann's latest cinematic man-crush on tight-lipped inscrutability and sparklingly pretty violence played out against the backdrop of the Great Depression.

Food: Chinese food, courtesy of Wei Hong Bakery and Restaurant: crab rangoon, shrimp dumpling lo mein, sesame chicken, rice, coconut roll.

Difficulty: Above average. Like most Chinese restaurants, Wei Hong prepares portions designed for family-syle passing and sharing, not secretive, slumped, cinema slurping. It's just a lot of food to sneak, even if the restaurant did wrap it tightly in a paper bag for me.

Point no accusatory finger at me, naysayers! The selection of delicious Chinese food for this fedoras-and-tommy-guns picture was no caprice of my stomach or schedule. Rather, it was the result of painstaking research into popular American foods of the 1920s and 1930s.

Feature this: With the institution of Federal Prohibition in 1919, an entire avenue of conspicuous group consumption was suddenly closed tighter than Highway 40 at Kingshighway. While liquor, wine and beer were still available in a variety of ways, including the infamous speakeasies (the modern incarnation of which I'll be slinking into in next week's blog), they were illegal and expensive, two things that made them out of reach for the average American entertaining at home.

A Separate Sneak

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Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons
Show: First of a two-episode arc, "Sniper," from the fourth season of Homicide: Life on the Street.

Food: Pills, booze.

Difficulty: Painful. Do not try this at home. Owwww.

So far I've detailed various methods of choosing sneakable foods, appropriate repackaging and wardrobe tips for aspiring sneaks without speaking truth directly to the power of sneaking food into the movies: unearthly sangfroid, the kind of confidence that makes a seventeen-year-old ticket-tearer piss icicles down his leg rather than ask why you're walking into Public Enemies with a capon tucked under one arm like you're the Heisman Trophy.

Nothing ruins this swagger more quickly than an unintentional shift in a sneak's physicality. I, for example, took a nasty spill off the last step of a friend's staircase this weekend and am currently sporting a minor limp in the left leg.

So what's a sneak to do?

The Science of Sneak

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Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons
In a previous episode, I extolled the virtues of ice cream mochi as a personal-sized, slow-melting, low-drip option for enjoying frozen treats after the fading of the footlights. In my continuing quest to bring you the very best information on how to sneak the foods you want into the movies you enjoy, I have embarked on a voyage of scientific inquiry that makes Darwin's time aboard the Beagle look like the man passed out drunk on a chaise after chugging too many rum runners during the pre-buffet Broadway medley on Deck 22.

Here, condensed for you with the incisive skill and fervor of a thousand Reader's Digests, are the lab notes from my most recent investigation, "An Inquiry Into the Efficacy of Endothermic Chemical Reactions in the Preservation of Frozen Treats":

The Best of Gut Check: The Sneak

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Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons
Dara Strickland is a leading expert on sneaking food and drink into the movies. She reports on her exploits for Gut Check (from an undisclosed location) every Monday.

While Gut Check is on vacation this week, check out some of Dara's best work:


The International vs. Jay's International (March 2, 2009):
The clear winner of my group was the flan. I love flan like Heloise loved Abelard, though I doubt she ever hoisted him over her head in an international grocery store and did an impromptu tap dance down the aisle. While definitely not the same push-yield texture as its homemade kin, this flan had a spongy layer where the normally-drippy and unsneakable caramel sauce had sunk into its gelatinous foot, improving its sneakability. The flan comes in a plastic dish, completely sealed with a foil wrapper. One person could eat the portion, but it might be better for two, especially with other snacks being snuck. I could have fit at least a dozen of these in my coat pockets and it still would have cost less than two tickets.
The Old Man and the Sneak (May 4, 2009):
We have dessert and coffee at Eclipse, the restaurant in the Moonrise Hotel, where Dad was the very first guest to stay in his particular room. He orders some amazing thing with ice cream and sauce and all manner of completely unsneakable garnishes. I order a compact, brilliantly textured homemade moon pie covered in rich chocolate ganache. So delicious. So sneakable. I eat it quietly, imagining all the places I could take it for want of some wax paper and the courage to tell my father what kind of deviant I am. I suffer.
To Boldly Sneak (May 18, 2009):
Perched on top of those two boxes was a smaller box with my neeps. I have no shame in admitting I ordered the neeps because I had no idea what they were but liked the sound they made. I chose the Scottish Arms both for its obvious connection to a certain engineering genius who, despite protests to the contrary, can change the laws of physics and for the fact that I don't know much about Scottish food. I wanted to enjoy a new direction in a franchise that was all about new directions by boldly eating where I had not gone before. I felt fairly certain that popular culture and a descriptive menu had warned me of the pitfalls of the cuisine and the very helpful bartender was able to answer my questions about what was in various sides.
Want to read more of the Sneak's exploits? Visit the complete archive.

Tags: sneaking

The Land of the Midnight Sneak

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Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons
I was planning on regaling you with tales of the highly appropriate rainbow-hued foods I snuck into the Pride Parade this weekend in Tower Grove Park. Alas, even Southern sneaks wilt like delicate magnolia blossoms in 100-plus degree heat, and I am no exception. I scuttled back indoors to live to sneak another day with less chance of heat stroke.

Instead, I'll offer you an exercise in one of the core doctrines of sneaking food into movies: appropriateness. Just as all food snuck into movies is not necessarily snuck ethically, far too much is snuck inappropriately. A good sneak is like a sommelier, enhancing the flavor and texture of a film with, well, flavors and textures.

For the purposes of this exercise, we'll be looking at the Tivoli's Reel Late Midnite Movie schedule. I cannot stress this enough: the Midnite Movie at the Tivoli is always great, even if you drift off in their comfy seats before the final credits roll (The Big Lebowski, flask of bourbon, and not being in college anymore, I'm looking at you.). As hot as it was on Saturday, I probably would have paid eight bucks just to sit in the air conditioning for two hours. The Tivoli's schedule of gentle cult classics (Crispin Glover, I am not looking at you, except in September when you play George McFly) and '80s nostalgia is a wonderful bonus to all that gloriously chilled air.

How to Win Sneaks and Influence People

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Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons
In a previous blog post, I talked about the passionate side of sneaking -- particularly for those who seek a Sneak. But you've doubtless noticed that, while one of the things dearest to me in this life is the B-movie laboratory St. Elmo's fire that flares when I unintentionally twine my salt-studded fingers against those of The Doctor, my mysterious long-time gentleman caller, as we both reach for the wasabi peas in my coat pocket, he's far from my only sneaking companion. This is not because my pirogi-smuggling pockets are promiscuous but rather because I have swiftly and surely converted every last one of my friends to my sneaky ways.

I actually had to do some research on that last claim. While I am utterly unabashed in making up studies and statistics conducted by and about fictional people, my actual friends are a stringently corrective lot. While they're quite aware that the cocoon of gossamer fabrications and gasoline-colored exaggerations I spin around my true thoughts and intentions is the cornerstone of their love for me, they will yell at me if I misrepresent them.

My research consisted of two conversations, the first with a grown man I still call "Jerkface" because he's such a good friend that he's like the little brother I never wanted and furthermore couldn't get rid of by mailing all of his stuff to Manhattan. As we've aged, my insults have gotten only slightly more sophisticated and continental.
Sneak: Hey, do we have any friends who would NOT sneak food into a movie?

Giorcfaccio (long pause): I doubt M, who you dated before The Doctor, would do so.

Sneak: M? Oh, god, that was like a pillar of our relationship.

Giorcfaccio: Really? He struck me as a non-sneaker.

Sneak: And he put up with me six months at my craziest? Oh no. The joy of dating a really tall guy is that his coat has really deep pockets. (He was at least 6'4" and lanky.)

Giorcfaccio: It all makes more sense now.

The 48-Hour Sneak Project

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Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons
There's an essential difference between discipline and morality, even when one is sneaking food into the movies. As I've discussed in previous posts, sneaking has its own ethics and its own style, a code less concerned with slavish devotion to rules than the currents of compassionate and appropriate behavior woven through the fabric of the situation.

I consider myself, as a Sneak and a person, to be more moral than disciplined. Displays of discipline for their own sake are fascinating to me.

Thus, my reaction to learning about the 48-Hour Film Project, which recently came to the Tivoli.

I was inspired. My creativity has been largely confined to making and repackaging food in a loose-limbed, rangy, casual way. I wanted to experience the way creativity pushes back against rules and, like ice radiating out from the black bark of a downed branch and sketching across the surface of a pond, becomes more beautiful for it.

For my 48-Hour Sneaking Challenge, I set the following rules:
1) The meal must be sneakable.

2) The meal must consist entirely of things that were in my apartment 48 hours before preparation began.

3) No sandwiches. Sandwiches are cheating.
Luckily for me, this coincided well with the Holy Crap, What Am I Going to Do With All This Produce I Got from the Farmers' Market Challenge. Also, I had some help.

The Audacity of Sneak

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Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons
Show: Up, Pixar's latest gorgeous, visually engaging attempt to make me laugh while feeling a little guilty. Total success on both counts.

Food: Mochi ice cream, mango flavored.

Difficulty: Moderate. This is the easiest form of ice cream to bring into the movies, but it still requires extensive planning for temperature maintenance and consumption mechanics.

Every time I tell someone about my ridiculous hobby, chronicled here for your enjoyment and edification, the conversation follows this script:
Them: Oh, that's interesting! What kinds of food do you sneak in?

Sneak: All kinds. Everything.

Them: Really? What's the most difficult thing you've snuck in somewhere?

Sneak: A bottle of champagne/a four-course meal/sushi for four. (This changes, depending on my mood.)

Them (stunned by lack of Swedish Fish, Diet Coke): Oh! That's...you're really serious about that.

Sneak: Deadly serious.

Them: Well, what about ice cream? Can you sneak in ice cream?
Can sneak, have snuck, will sneak again.

The problem with describing how to sneak ice cream into a movie theater to a non-Sneak is that they don't think about food in a sneaky way. To them, ice cream is a single thing, where to someone used to thinking about how long something can go in a purse or pocket before warming to a less than ideal consistency, it's a continuum of foods with vastly different properties. While I appreciate the ecumenical openness of non-Sneaks, it's not helpful. It's a bit like walking into Middle East peace talks, looking around at all sides and saying, "Hey, did you guys ever notice you're all monotheists? This is great! You have so much in common!"

To get things done, you have to understand the inherent differences. While the summer heat will call out many more tales of sweet frozen treats furtively licked in theater seats, I'm going to start with the ice cream subset that, in my vast experience, is most easily snuck: mochi ice cream.

A Sneak of One's Own

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Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons
Show: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Food: Izumi salad, unagi crêpe, and taro milk tea with boba from BBC Asian Cafe & Bar.

Difficulty: Junior-varsity -- food was poorly packed for sneaking and nearly impossible to repackage; mitigating factors included a dark plastic takeout bag and a drink in a self-sealing container.

There is a jar of pickled asparagus in my purse.

Sometimes I have these moments of clarity about my sneaking where I see myself as if I'm leaning back in a stadium seat and watching the events of my life unfold after the house lights go down. Sometimes I replay snippets of conversation in my head, and I realize how far I've fallen out of the fraternity of humankind. Finding that unexpected jar of asparagus in my purse was exactly such a moment. I wasn't even trying to sneak it anywhere. I'd brought it to a dinner party to round out a cheese plate and it never made it out of my bag. Finding food you forgot you were carrying around in your bag is the Sneak's equivalent of waking up poured over the wheel of someone else's car ten miles from Reno with the radio playing, both back doors open and two and a half lines of blow left on the dash.

That jar of pickled asparagus is my marker, my saline-packed scarlet letter, setting me apart from most of modern civilization as thoroughly as a set of adamantium claws. It was fitting that I discovered it just before this solo sneak.

Although I mostly write about sneaks I have perpetrated with another person, sneaking is at its core a solitary experience. Think about all the times in your life you have eaten in public, down to the last taco: Someone could see you. Until you were about twelve, it was probably your mother. That hot dog you had at the last Cards game? Anyone who didn't have her eye on the ball could see you lick ketchup off your fingers. Even when I'm standing over the sink in the privacy of my own damn home, the unblinking glass-green eyes of Nebula, my cat, watch every bite. One of the only places you can eat utterly inconnu is the movie theater.

It's been statistically proven by no one at all that 75% of Americans feel uncomfortable to very uncomfortable going to a movie alone and upwards of 85% of those same made-up people say the same thing about eating at a restaurant. I do both often and without hesitation. In fact, I have occasional moments of sneaking introversion, where I feel I need to "recharge" by sneaking alone after prolonged contact sneaking with others. It should surprise no one that when it comes to food and movies, I am some sort of mutant. The jar of pickled asparagus is only the latest manifestation.

A Sneak at the Opera

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Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons
Dara Strickland is a leading expert on sneaking food and drink into the movies. She reports on her exploits for Gut Check (from an undisclosed location) every Monday. This week, she snuck into Gut Check International Headquarters on a Wednesday with this missive...

Show: La Cenerentola, the Metropolitan Opera's last show of the season, simulcast in HD from New York to the St. Louis Art Museum.

Food
: A brunch/Italian feast for two plundered from the Straub's deli case; quiche, arancini, cannoli, fresh cherries, and a 4-pack of individually-sized bottles of pinot grigio.

Difficulty: Surprisingly simple.

I have to get something out of the way before I can talk about either the joys of watching the opera like it's a movie or the excellent sneakovation that is packaging drinkable wine in single-servings. I have never, in my twenty years of successful sneaking, gone to any food-negative event and seen more people with food than I did at the opera. I'm a cynical woman -- many would even say a hard woman, with some edges that don't respond to any amount of the natural erosions of the whipping grit of life's surprises.

I was floored.

This was a theater packed full of people almost exclusively over 60, largely ladies, and they were walking in with purses and soft-sided coolers with little concern for subtlety. It was like I pulled a Rip van Winkle in the hallway outside the auditorium and woke up in a distant future where my agitations about the joy of bringing your own food along to entertainment events has been embraced by the culture at large. It was glorious, magical; fittingly like a fairy tale.

To Boldly Sneak

thesneak.jpg
Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons
Dara Strickland is a leading expert on sneaking food and drink into the movies. She reports on her exploits for Gut Check (from an undisclosed location) every Monday.

Show: Star Trek, the front-runner to be this year's Iron Man: a fun, exciting, even sexy reboot of an old fandom that previously had more than a whiff of mom's basement about it that goes on to be wildly successful. Terminator Salvation, I hope you took some notes.

Food: Shepherd's pie, vegetable terrine in a sweet walnut sauce and neeps from the Scottish Arms.

Difficulty: Varsity. Extensive repackaging was required and I utilized an additional cloaking device.

I had a crisis of conscience as I sat at the bar in the Scottish Arms, having a pint and waiting for my takeout order. While the pub itself is a jewel of genuine warmth, all rubbed hardwood, half-melted naked pillar candles and an impressive collection of gradually accrued Guinness mirrors and other genuine bar detritus, I was chilled to the bone by a display case highlighted by the early evening sun spilling in from the plate glass. For reasons I believe I may be culturally unsuited to understand, there is an enormous marionette of some sort in this case, about three feet tall and tricked out in a little kilt and cravat with an alarmingly functional-looking bagpipe.

And there are sequins.

My god, that spangly little Highlander is as subtle as Captain Kirk amidst the green women of Bustulon 36. I was concerned that a similar, Sneak-averse sentiment would express itself in the food in both flavor and packaging and was, once again, thankful for the roll of aluminum foil I keep around for just such an occasion.

Sneako de Mayo

thesneak.jpg
Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons
Dara Strickland is a leading expert on sneaking food and drink into the movies. She reports on her exploits for Gut Check (from an undisclosed location) every Monday.

Let us now praise famous foods.

The long skinny baguette sandwich, able to be laid across the bottom of a bag, in a particularly deep coat pocket or -- at most extreme lengths -- couched like a lance between non-ticket-buying arm and ribs beneath a concealing piece of clothing: We salute you.

The Asian street food crêpe, curled in conical delight around your crisp vegetables, rich sauces and mysterious parts of the pig, a cornucopia of temperatures, textures and flavors: We salute you.

But greatest praise is reserved for the most sneakable take-out food of them all...

The burrito.

How can I express to you the balance of its flavors in the celluloid glare, the way every grain of rice or black-sheathed bean makes demands against the tongue to be counted in the dusk of a theater in a way they are never emboldened to do under the florescent lights of the Qdoba sign?

The Old Man and the Sneak

thesneak.jpg
Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons
Dara Strickland is a leading expert on sneaking food and drink into the movies. She reports on her exploits for Gut Check (from an undisclosed location) every Monday.

Show: An astonishing schedule of St. Louis' cultural high points.

Food: Not a damn thing.

Difficulty: Outrageous. I've reached the point in my life where it's actually easier for me to Sneak than not. At one point, I was going through such awful Sneak withdrawal that I had to sit on my hands lest my fingers, unbidden, uncontrollably unwrap phantom burritos.

This weekend, my father came up to visit me during prime Sneaking time. He and I get along very well, and I love it when he visits, though there are two things that cause some stress when he does: I don't do any Sneaking, and he has a gobsmacking amount of energy and appetite for novelty for a retired guy in his early 60s. His visits go quickly from pleasant amusement to a deathmatch-intensity competition to see which one of us will give up and take a nap first.

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Aztec warrior, presumably not about to be electrocuted.
Notable things my father has actually done since retiring:
- He's become the stuff of high-school legend by sneaking up to a truck full of 16-year-old boys (intent on drinking their way through a cooler in what they thought was an empty field) and drawing his piece on them. In any given horror movie, underage drinking in a bucolic setting gives you a 50% chance of Jason Voorhees impaling you on a tree and a 50% chance of my pistol-packin' dad asking to see your license and making you pour out your beer.

- He's been the filling in a collision sandwich between a stone wall and the front of an Oldsmobile. It crushed his Miata like a beer can on a DZ pledgemaster's forehead, but he climbed out of the top of the car and asked the elderly lady in the offending land yacht if she was all right or needed him to call an ambulance for her.

- He was moderately electrocuted in an Aztec gold mine.

The Sneakfecta: The Sneak Visits Fairmount Park

thesneak.jpg
Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons
Dara Strickland is a leading expert on sneaking food and drink into the movies. She reports on her exploits for Gut Check (from an undisclosed location) every Monday.

Show: The Saturday night claiming race at Fairmount Park.

Food: Sandwiches: brie, apple and walnut; goat cheese, basil, and tomato. Yeah, I know how to class up the track.

Difficulty: Medium. While initially very intimidating, no one at the park batted an eye at my sneaking-tote. Sandwiches were, of course, tubular and individually wrapped in aluminum foil.

The turnstiles at Fairmount Park have a certain "we're supposed to walk across Mordor but our civilization was so busy building adorable burrows and brewing quality beers that it hasn't discovered shoes" sense of foreboding about them. There are large signs posted at exactly my eye level that insist you can't bring in food and drink. To enter the Park proper, you have to pay an attendant in a glass booth just before stepping through a narrow metal turnstile. I shrugged the straps of my sneaking tote from my shoulder to the crook of my fingers, dropping it below the scrutiny of that all-seeing booth.

After passing that Rubicon, however, my die still wasn't definitively cast. The employees of Fairmount Park are virtually indistinguishable from the patrons. In the interest of keeping order inside the park, a ban on customers wearing polo shirts would do a lot more than banning food and beverage.

After a few initial moments of fear that I might have to show the inside of my bag, I calmed down. It was thrilling for me, really. In twenty years of sneaking food into the movies, I have never been searched. After a program of careful cultivation of my Sneaking skills and a natural sangfroid that turns Coke to Icees in their cups, I don't fear this from any tie-wearing theater clerk.

But the track's not my natural element, and movie theaters haven't traditionally had problems with the Mafia.

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