Behind the Ironic Column

When somebody tells you that a vibrating bed is part of a featured scene in a movie, you assume that it’s a sex scene of some kind.  But, in the case of “Bonneville,” you’d be wrong.  There is indeed a vibrating bed, but it symbolizes being shaken out of your usual routines more than anything to do with beds or sex. 

Three women, past their youth and not quite sure what their lives have become, are on a road trip to deliver the ashes of one of the husbands to his daughter’s family in California.  In the course of their unexpected trip, they spend the night in a motel somewhere in Utah that happens to have one of those “magic fingers” vibrating systems — you put a quarter in the controller box and get a few minutes of vibration. 

I don’t know what the original intent of these systems was and I haven’t thought about them in years.  When I was a senior in high school (in a small town in N.C.), we made one of those “senior trips” to Washington, D.C., and stayed in a motel in Virginia.  Several of us stayed in one room to save on expenses. I remember our room had two double beds that were equipped with those vibrating systems.  That was both the first time I ever remember staying in a motel and certainly the first time I’d seen such a thing as a vibrating bed.  It was hilarious. We spent all our change on that machine, collapsing into giggles every time.  I doubt that most places have such devices any more.  In any event, it didn’t really have sexual overtones to us — at least not any more than everything does when you’re a teenager. If we’d been allowed to have the boys visit our room, things might have been different.  But they were safely off in their own section of the motel, and we were free to just play. 

The vibrating bed doesn’t have overly sexual overtones for the women in the film; it’s mostly the idea of loosening up, relaxing your normal routines, and doing something just because it’s fun.  Those are all good points to remember, whether we’re on a road trip encountering vibrating beds or just living our regular lives.

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