20 Things I've Learned From Watching Movies

1. No matter where you live. No matter what culture you're from. No matter what you're making for dinner. If you go grocery shopping you will come home with a baguette.

2. Never accept a dare that involves a graveyard, a haunted house, or a prom. Always say "no" when anyone begins a sentence with "Hey, why don't we...?"

3. No Broadway musical ever depicted will actually fit in a Broadway theatre. Oh yes, and apparently all choreography in Broadway musicals is meant to be seen from directly above the state.

4. Blood comes out of the body in slow motion.

5. If you burst into song and dance in the middle of the street, nobody will notice.

6. Children of ministers always end up crazy.

7. People can do nothing but bicker for two hours and then declare endless love in the last minutes. Alternately people will have one conversation and fall madly in love and spend the next two hours going through hell for someone they only knew for 15 minutes.

8. Any group of American soldiers in WWII had to include one wise-cracking Italian guy from Brooklyn or the Bronx, and one kid named "Jimmy."

9. If you were a kid named "Jimmy" in WWII your life expectancy was approximately 92 minutes.

10. Never, ever, dig up a mummy. Apparently mummification worked very well because they're all still alive.

11. Life was sexier when we didn't know smoking and drinking were bad for you.

12. America would have lost every war ever fought if it weren't for John Wayne.

13. Before 1950 everyone in America was white with the exception of Pullman porters and Charlie Chan.

14. The miraculous conception of every baby born before 1960 was done in separate beds.

15. Your family didn't officially count as "eccentric" unless Mishca Auer was in residence.

16. Gangsters love their mothers.

17. The only good thing to come out of Nazism is that Hollywood will never want for evil villains.

18. The middle ages were the zenith of cleanliness.

19. A "dame" will always be cooler than a "broad" and a "broad" will always be cooler than a "bitch."

20. Rule number one in The Astronauts' Guide to Getting Along with Aliens is "kill it."