Create: Outdoor home theatre

There’s only one season of the year when you can watch movies and enjoy the warm weather at the same time. If you’re lucky, you can pull up to a drive-in and watch the latest superhero sequel 10 metres high. If not, here’s how to make your own version in your backyard.

AT THE DRIVE-IN, life does not recede when the movie begins. To the contrary, life asserts itself. People eat dinner in covered dishes. They drink cans of beer from coolers secreted past the gate. Kids stubbornly play on dimly lit playgrounds. I’ve seen vigorous games of ultimate Frisbee at drive-ins. And dogs.

Yes, we hang the speaker on the window. And sure, we take a gander at the movie, even from the backseat. But no one goes to a drivein for the movie. We go to a drive-in to be outside as we watch our stories unfold 10 metres above us, against the sliver of sunset, the darkling light, the waxing disk of a summer moon.

In the backyard, it’s even better. When someone strings a bedsheet across his backyard in order to watch West Side Story one more time? Count me in. It’s a conscious kind of movie watching, the creation of sound and light against a diaphanous, imperfect scrim. Dancing looks better against a bedsheet. Bigband music resonates better when the wind blows.

This is a conscious sort of outdoor living, in which the comfort of an Adirondack chair at twilight is not taken for granted. Here, at home, life recedes because you ask it to. You can lie down on the lawn. This is your property after all. Your grass. You tend this place by day.

In the end, maybe any summer’s night is meant to be forgotten. Maybe any movie is merely incidental when set against the larger world. It’s all just light and sound above the crickets, after all. But with a backyard movie, you can sit back and take a look at the stars. You are fully outdoors and fully at the movies, too. Stars are everywhere you look.