THE MANCHESTER VILLAGE MOTOR INN
☆☆☆☆☆ (0 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing the Manchester Village Motor Inn of Manchester, CT.
If you ever need a place to stay while your lawyer and the bank are figuring some things out, I don’t recommend the Manchester Village Motor Inn. For one thing, they make you witness a robbery when checking in. The robber is armed, will seize your wallet and refer to you as “bitch-face.” This is an incredibly traumatic way to begin one’s stay. Then you have to call 911 yourself and even check in a few guests before the police arrive because the desk clerk is in tears and afraid to get off the floor even though the gunman is clearly long gone.
To their credit, they do give you a free night’s stay, but only because you’ve checked yourself in. All of this will take a couple of hours, so don’t arrive late like I did, because you won’t even get to your room until almost 2 a.m.
If the residual fear doesn’t keep you awake, the guy who enters your room just as you’re drifting off will. He’ll be equally surprised to see you and will apologize and leave. Maybe not all rooms have uninvited guests, but mine did. I stayed in the Marilyn Monroe room which had an enormous mural of her painted on the ceiling by, I think, a day laborer.
Unfortunately the room didn’t have any windows, and with a broken clock I really lost all sense of time. So when I went to the front desk to rent a movie that the photocopied sheet of paper labeled “ameninites” informed me of, I discovered it was 9 a.m. Standing next to a family that was checking out I felt conspicuous in just my robe.
The movies they offer are only available on VHS, which is good news for anyone like me who doesn’t understand how to work a DVD player. But the selection is slim. They have two copies of Ghost Dad (both checked out) and a copy of Hotel Rwanda, which I’d seen three times already. I asked if they had any more movies and the desk clerk pulled out a laminated sheet of paper and winked at me. I winked back because I’m polite. None of the titles were familiar to me, so I settled on something called The Organ Grinder.
The worst thing about the Manchester Village Motor Inn is that if you lock yourself out of your room, wearing only a robe (on a windy day) and are holding a copy of The Organ Grinder, people get scared and you get arrested.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing jail cells.
