My husband and I have a term for when we surprise each other.
“Don’t look at my calendar, I’m planning a pepper!” he’ll say to me.
Or, “Can you mark May 17th from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. for a pepper? All you need to bring is a poncho and sunscreen.”
"Pepper" is our catchall way of indicating a surprise gift for each other. Past peppers have included a limousine ride to Home Depot, tickets to a Taylor Swift superfan-themed dance party, customized basketball trading cards, and a weekend at the Madonna Inn.
We’ve used the term so much that I almost forgot its origin. Then, the other day, I was scrolling through Criterion Channel and came across The Canyons, the microbudget sexy (?) thriller written by Bret Easton Ellis and directed by Paul Shrader. There it was: the genesis of "pepper."
On one of our first dates, Ash and I watched The Canyons, much like one watches a small child fall on an ice skating rink. You both cannot look away and cannot stop laughing. Between stars Lindsay Lohan and James Deen, it’s often hard to tell who’s bedazzled ankle monitor shines the hardest in any given moment. In a group sex scene, with lighting that’s serving up early 2000s bat mitzvah, there’s barely any set decoration save for … one green pepper inexplicably positioned on an otherwise empty nightstand.
At that moment, Ash and I paused, rewinded and giggled until our sides hurt, absolutely baffled by this small vegetable’s inclusion in the shot. On our next sleepover, Ash placed a pepper on the bedside table and waited until I noticed it. Since then, "pepper" has become part of our lexicon, and the lore of our love.
Recently, Ash and I watched the 2025 Academy Awards. While my thoughts on Anora have been thoroughly documented here on Talkhouse, one part of the Anora team’s acceptance speeches stood out to me. (In addition to the eye-roll of Alex Coco saying, “We made this movie independently” and Samantha Quan adding, “We made this with very little money,” despite a budget of $6 million, a partnership with Neon, and a marketing budget of an additional $18 million for their Oscars campaign…).
It was the moment when director Sean Baker said, “Where did we fall in love with the movies? At the movie theater. Movie theaters … are struggling, and it’s up to us to support them.”
I immediately thought about planning a movie-theater pepper. One of Ash’s favorite movies – that I’d never actually seen before – is Fried Green Tomatoes.
I wanted to plan a pepper where we watched Fried Green Tomatoes together, but with added pomp and circumstance. I started to brainstorm …
Of course, my thoughts immediately went to Justin Bieber. In 2011, Bieber took his then-girlfriend Selena Gomez on a private date in Los Angeles’ 20,000-seat Staples Center to watch Titanic.
“Romance isn’t dead,” he tweeted at the time.
Damn right. And movie theaters aren’t dead, either.
I found a local theater in L.A., and scanned their website for their special events manager’s contact information. After a few emails back and forth, we settled on a date and time for me to rent out a screen.
The original quote they gave me was a little steep. I explained that it’d just be the two of us, and we were willing to come on slow nights of the week. We locked in a date for a Monday, and I was able to negotiate $200 less than the original quote, with a food and beverage minimum of $30. All I had to do was show up with the DVD and hand it off to the projectionist.
When we got there, Ash had no idea what to expect. His face lit up when I took him into the theater and there was no one inside but us. I’d already handed off the DVD (Ash still had no idea what we were going to watch) and after a few false starts and a mini-heart attack moment where I thought maybe a technical difficulty would derail the whole night, the opening sequence finally rolled. The pepper deployed perfectly.
Watching one of Ash’s favorite films on the big screen – just the two of us – elevated the experience and brought a gravity to the film that might not have otherwise been there. The bond between the characters Idgie (Mary Stuart Masterson) and Ruth (Mary-Louise Parker) felt more moving than it otherwise might have. The cringe of the film’s racist colorblindness felt more cringeworthy. The Alabama sunrises shone brighter and the sunsets expanded across greater terrain.
And as someone who’s very sensitive to loud sounds – which can contribute to favoring the home-screening experience – being able to ask the projectionist to adjust the volume was an added bonus.
Ash and I held hands and were transported somewhere else for two hours and 10 minutes.
So, if you’ve got a few extra bucks to rub together, hit up your local theater and take someone special out for a surprise pepper. And for extra points, play by movie theater rules: turn your phone off before it starts.
