Let me take you back to the Drive-In....those of you that are younger may have missed this era (I hope not)...so sit back and Remember! When I turned off Speedway and entered the Midway Drive-In I pulled up to the guard shack and looked at the poor SOB dressed as a white uniformed attendant who asked how many were in the car (not including the ones I hid in the trunk) I gave him my dollars and drove forward, if I had arrived late (which was usual), good manners demanded that I kill the lights and creep till I selected a parking space between two speakers, hopefully they were working or you were going to repeat this step again. Of course since you had a date, (you better have a date or someone is going to rat you out on Speedway and let everyone know that you go to movies alone and park in the back row....which is creepy, you do not want to be creepy), you had to ensure that she had a good time. It was humorous to watch the cars scramble for favorite spots in the last row. Families parked up front, we had the back. The screen dimmed, then some jackass would turn his headlights on to illuminate the screen. Now there were two kinds of girls, the first was a princess who expected you to hit the snack bar (and take her order), the second kind of girl would trot along with you. If I had girl #1, then I would be expected to wander off and grab the popcorn and drinks. Curiously, all Drive-In snack bars seem to be grubby on purpose, bad lighting that flickered outside and harsh lights inside. In the background you could here a swamp box cooler wheezing along and blowing NADA (and hot NADA at that). Of course you had all of the typical night pests hovering around the lights and landing on the delights (insects not people). As you exited the bunker you might notice the quality construction, hard cement block laced with mortar which had oozed out of the brick joints and hardened back in 1943. Did I mention the prices?, ya dont wanna know! As I exited, I noticed the fat sweating projectionist that had started the reel and quickly came outside to dangle a smoke and ogle the girls...or maybe guys....hey! So, back to my car I strolled with my unbalanced divided box of beverages and goodies, guess what...the ground is uneven and the load is not exactly balanced. if you are lucky enough to locate your wheels in the darkness, you are almost home. Getting into my car while avoiding the speaker wire and not spilling the princesses drink was a challenge...now if you bought a hotdog and she wants mustard or ketchup, you better have brought that, if not you are going back! Once in the car she cant tell if shes if she putting ketchup or mustard on the damned thing in the dark....both condiments look dark in the dark....dont touch that dome light unless you are in the back row or someone is going to honk. So now you get to watch the movie that has been playing for the past 20 minutes and she is now having to tell you what you missed so you know what the hell your watching. Now 30 minutes into this damned thing she has to go to the bathroom and YOU have to walk her there...this escorting behavior is automatic since it has been drilled into you from birth by the woman that trained you (your mother) So we stroll over and hold our noses and visit this little hell hole. Back to the car we go making sure that we dont trip on the humps as we return. We might see Speedway Cruisers that we know and tell them we will meet them (you guessed it!) at the snack bar during intermission. Now we have to get back in the car so you open her door (her mom has trained her to never go out with you again if you forget this). Now remember dont let her slam the door or she going to break your window since the speaker is still hung there. You just lost another 20 minutes of the movie! Now we arrive at intermission, the lights go up and the advertising begins, endless flickering video of badly dressed kids eating some type of really bad looking stuff, even the food looks bad since the commercials were filmed in 1949 and have faded out. So we walk back to the hell hole, I mean snack bar and meet our friends, this is where the fights start because now everyone knows who was in what cars with whom and there is a good chance (if your date is pretty) her ex-boyfriend is there looking for HER, so as you wail the tar out of each other just outside the lights, she goes into the snack bar with several of her friends. Now if you really wanted to impress your date you would have your friends place endless calls to the drive-in to have you paged and it would come over the speaker... ah, you must be an important guy!...this also allowed you to escape the car (if you needed to). Well after visiting or fighting during intermission, it was back to the car and repeat the earlier steps. Now if this girl was THE one (and you prayed she was), then it was to hell with the movie and all of the other stuff except the bathroom, so going steady had its privileges. If you were parked in the back rows you had to also be very aware of what was going on around you, you had to be on the lookout for little pre-teen dweebs trying to peek in the cars or let the air out of your tires. Or your friends rocking the car and scaring the shit out of your date (and ruining the mood) or the absolute worst...an older man with a flash light looking for his daughter in the back rows! When the movie was over, the grove of cars exited the theatre and formed a flotilla waiting to exchange the Midway for Speedway. We then joined the late-night traffic in cruising to Johnies with the radio tuned to KTKT....oh, what nights!...I would do it all again if I could just turn the clock back.
Posted on: Thu, 07 Aug 2014 06:13:15 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015