Part of my Year of TV Pirating involves watching classic movies that I've never seen, so I'm watching Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation today, and there's a scene where Gene Hackman visits Teri Garr in her apartment, and he joins her in bed.
While they're talking, Garr gets up and grabs a box of crackers . She returns to the bed and starts eating them.
That got me wondering about the old phrase, "I wouldn't kick him/her out of bed for eating crackers," and if The Conversation could be the origin of that.
Nope. Turns out it's much older, going back to around 1906, when a pitcher for the Phillies
complained in a letter that his catcher and roommate (they didn't pay players much back then) was keeping him up by eating crackers in bed. The letter got out to the newspapers and everyone had a good laugh over it, except maybe the pitcher.
Coppola must have been using the phrase as a visual joke.