Drive-in Movies!

This will put you in your historical places, I'm thinking. A virtual hand raise if you remember drive-in movies. For those youngsters who were not fortunate enough, I pity you.

Drive-in movies were all the rage (and the norm) back when there was land enough to build one. You had to have a lot of land to accommodate hundreds of cars (which were huge back when), a walk-in concession stand with picnic tables and chairs on the patio out front and an ENORMOUS movie screen with enough room for a kiddie playground in front of it.

Out in west Texas there was LOTS 'o LAND, so we had lots 'o drive-ins. There was no question where you spent a Friday or Saturday night when you were a teenager...especially a teenager in 'luv.' Even before your teen years, if your parents were half the parents they should have been, they put you in your jammies, piled you in the back area of the station wagon with plenty of blankets, pillows and stuffed animals and off everyone went to see a cheap Japanese horror movie at the drive-in.

How many of you made it into a drive-in as the odd-man-out in the trunk of the car because there just wasn't enough cash to get everyone in? Or, how many of you had to take your little sister or brother to the drive-in as a parental condition for being able to go at all? That was fine, because you just shoo'ed them out of the car the minute you rolled in. And, weren't those big, clunky speakers that you attached to the inside of the car window funny? I'm having so many nostalgic visuals right now that I've got a grin from ear to ear, and I know that some of you do too!

Let's see...what else...oh yeah, making out at the drive-in. Ahhhhhh, caution to the wind, garments tossed aside, ONE front seat in the car for total access (by the way, I REALLY want car makers to go back to the one-seat in the front thingy. I miss that!), fogged-up car windows, etc....I could go on and on here, but then I really would start to sound like a slut.

Going to the drive-in in the back of a truck was fun too, cuz you could bring lawn chairs, drink beer and harass everyone within ear shot. Running from car to car gossiping, pointing flashlights in the cars with fogg-ed up windows and creating mayhem was the most fun...and frankly, I can't remember the name or content of a single drive-in movie I ever went to. That wasn't the point.

I want the drive-in back. If we can use up enough land to bury our dead on millions of acreage, we should still be able to set aside enough for a friggin drive-in here and there!

kk

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I loved going to the drive-in on Friday and Saturday nights in highschool with my boyfriend. We parked next to all of our buddies who were the bad boys of Midland High School. It was like a tailgate party except with entertainment. We were parked all in a line. We put blankets on top of the front windshields (for reclining) and brought out the cooler that held about a case and a half of Bud. We bought a pack of PallMalls or Lucky Strikes and stole a bottle of liquor from one of our parent's houses and then we proceeded to PARTAY!! KK's right about the actual movie not being the point. We also snuck people into the lot in the trunk and sometimes in my 1964, all-metal Belair Cevrolet we could get about ten kids in there. By the time the movie was over we were all so drunk we were running around to all the cars, whoopin it up and swinging on the kiddie swings in front of the screen.

Sometimes people who were in the car would accidentally drive off without putting the big, metal speaker thingy back and therefor pull it off of the post. You had to find one that had the speaker and by the 60's most of them were gone because people purposefully filched them. Our drive-in was called the 'Yucca Drive-In Theater' and it had a big, yellow, neon yucca plant in front of the entrance.

One day the drive-in didn't open and the tumble weeds blew across the empty lot of vertical iron pipes that once held twin clip-on speakers. The sign out front disappeared and the screen started looking like an old, torn poster. Even the blue and yellow glass popcorn maker was torn out by the time I got home from my fourth year of college. Desolate. Sad.

I have a cocktail book of pictures of old drive-ins across the country. They were something. Come on over and I will make you some really good movie popcorn in the big glass machine out on the back porch. You can find our house by following the sidewalk lighting that looks like a string of old, drive-in movie speakers. Really, you can't miss it. Just look for the yellow, neon yucca plant on the second floor porch.

Those were the good old days,
SalGal