I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron Read Free Book Online Page A

what?” I said.
    “Less than half a million,” he said.
    Way less than a half million, it turned out. Thanks to Irwin the dentist, Hal had lost almost all his money in the Puerto Rican adventure. What was left, divided by eight, would buy sod, but it was not going to rescue me from the screenplay I was writing.
    “The good news,” the lawyer said, “is that if you inherit less than sixty-eight thousand dollars, there’s no inheritance tax.”
    I called Delia and Amy and told them. I didn’t call Hallie. I was never speaking to my sister Hallie again.
    I went upstairs and turned on my computer and went back to work.
    The next week my sister Amy called to say that she had heard from Hal’s lawyer that there might be a Monet. There was a painting in the closet, and theywere sending it to the appraiser. By then, I had ceased hoping, but it didn’t stop Amy from entering the fourth stage of inherited wealth: The Possible Masterpiece in the Closet.
    I probably don’t need to tell you that it was not a Monet.
    In the end, the four of us inherited about $40,000 each from Uncle Hal.
    So I never did enter the fifth stage of inherited wealth: Wealth.
    I finished the screenplay and it got made. I am quick to draw lessons from my own experience, and the lesson I drew from this one was that I was extremely lucky not to have ever inherited real money, because I might not have finished writing
When Harry Met Sally
, which changed my life.
    When Harry Met Sally
was a huge hit and it even went into profit. We bought a dogwood. It’s really beautiful. It blooms in late June, and it reminds me of my sweet Uncle Hal.

Going to the Movies
    We went to the movies the other night. We live in New York City, where it costs $13.00 to see a movie, which doesn’t include the $1.50 surcharge for buying the tickets ahead of time online. I love buying tickets ahead of time online. One of the genuine miracles of modern life, as far as I’m concerned, is that moment when you enter a movie theater and stick your credit card into a machine, and it spits the exact tickets you ordered straight out at you. Every single time it happens, I just want to say, “I don’t believe it! This is great!! Wow!!!”
    On the other hand, it turns out that there’s a newtechnological advance in the buying-tickets-ahead-of-time department that takes all the fun out of it: you can now print out your confirmation at home, skip the machine, and go straight to the ticket taker. The ticket taker then scans your printout and prints the tickets right at the entrance to the theater, thus holding up all the people behind you on the ticket line and entirely eliminating the one miraculous moment you used to be able to count on when going to see a movie.
    But the other night, as it turned out, we didn’t have to give our printout to the ticket taker, because when we walked into the theater, there was no ticket taker. The entrance to the theater was completely empty of personnel. The other customers just walked right in without giving their tickets to anyone, and we did too. We trooped two flights downstairs to Theater 7, expecting to bump into a ticket taker on our way to the theater, but we never did. We had also hoped to buy something at the refreshment counter, but the lower-level refreshment counter was closed and the popcorn was just sitting there, getting stale, in a big cold pile.
    I should probably say at this point that the theater we went to was the Loews Orpheum 7, which is located at Eighty-sixth Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan. I should probably also say that the Loews Orpheum 7 is owned by AMC, but it used to be owned by Loews Cineplex Entertainment Corporation, and when it was, I was on the board of directors of Loews. This was a sad experience in my life, because I had modestly hoped, in my role as a board member, to do something about theunbelievably low quality of the food sold in movie theaters. As it turned out, no one at Loews cared about what I