Show and tell
A double-feature of romance, true confessions and remarkable minis
I figure that if I keep writing these things, sooner or later you’ll discover my nefarious past. So…
The drive-in, who doesn’t love it? Maker of memories, it’s open again and I’m thinking about asking my wife out on a date. We met in Alberta in what I assumed out there to be the post drive-in era. So, it might be neat to jump in the car now and go. If there’s a double-feature we can agree on. Or if the first movie is better than the second. Speaking for myself, I’m usually sawing logs by 11:30 at the latest. I get hangovers now simply from staying up after midnight.
Anyway, we’re lucky when it comes to watching movies together. We both like action flicks.
Maybe we’ll go when “Mission Impossible 6: Fallout” comes out. With the death-defying, age-denying Tom Cruise. He’s still pumping these movies out left and right – Jack Reacher, Ethan Hunt, the guy in the scifi version of “Ground Hog Day” and he’s like 56. Still doing his own stunts, and plenty of them. Hanging from airplanes, falling off motorcycles, beating up five, six tough guys at a time. I love it. Though, I’m waiting for him to fall apart too, like he oughtta. Anyway.
The drive-in. I want to go, but I’m wondering where does one in my personal, situational demographic park. It used to be there were two kinds of people went to the drive-in. Little kids – with their parents of course – who went more for the playground under the big screen. The old man would park the car and roar out - “Go play!” - and the kids piled out.
The people in those cars parked up the front.
Everybody else was there to make out.
It was like every car in the place was on its own little desert island.
Maybe the only movie that was ever really watched at the drivein, The Midway Drive-In back in the 70s, was “The Exorcist.” I went twice. The first time with eight people crammed like sardines into my step-father’s twodoor Chevelle. All screaming all night long. Then we went back the very next night with just three of us to see what we missed.
And “Halloween” - with a couple of buddies. They saw it the night before and went along so they could lunge at me every time just before Michael Myers jumped out of the woods or the closet, the fridge or the shower with his butcher knife. Me nerves were shot.
Anyway. I’d just as soon skirt the Thousand Islands.
But things might be different now that they’ve basically stopped making bench seats.
And I think I’d like the no-speaker, no-mosquitos, no-rain deal.
And I’ll be only too happy to pay to get in.
We never paid to get in back then and I feel guilty writing this. I hear you pay per carload now instead of per person. Then though, we’d give the girls we were with some loose change and then get out at the airport road and come in through the woods behind the drive-in. The thrill was not the getting in free, the thrill was not getting eaten by the owner’s legendary German shepherd.
One night as my buddy Glen and I hung back waiting for dark we heard a noise behind us and spun around. Two guys in an Austin Mini appeared like magic from the dense woods, got out, and without a word, hauled two thick planks from the bushes and placed them over the ditch, the moat that surrounded the drive-in, got back in the Mini and crossed over.
That was the day we rank amateurs, obviously short on truly deviant imagination, returned to living honest, upright lives. Fellas, if you’re reading this … Thank you. And I salute you still.
See you in the canteen maybe. This side of twenty bucks.