I don’t know exactly when the drive-in opened for the season. In my memory it feels like Memorial Day to Labor Day, but that may be the swimming pool talking. Memory blurs the edges sometimes. Pools and drive-ins both belong to warm weather, late daylight, summer skin, and children who thought the world was supposed to smell faintly of cut grass, popcorn, and coconut oil.
Two drive-ins exist in my world: one lived in Macon, and one lived in Moberly. Moberly was more my mother‘s town. She had taught school there, so it had a little different claim on her. We went to the Moberly drive-in often, but I think the Macon drive-in had its place in my heart. Between the two of them, I know I learned as much about life, movies, weather, families, and human behavior as I learned anywhere else.
When I was little, the drive-in still had those wonderful speakers that we pulled off the pole and hung in our car window. To me as a child, those looked like magic lunchboxes that talked. My dad rolled the window down just enough, hooked the speaker over the glass, and hoped it worked.
Sometimes it didn’t.
If a person got to the drive-in early and the speaker was dead, there was a little moral dilemma involved. We could put it back and move the car to another space. Or, if nobody had pulled in beside us yet, we could try the other side and take the good speaker.
Of course, then the people who came later discovered their speaker didn’t work, and they were not very thrilled with us. My own feeling, looking back, is that maybe they should’ve gotten there earlier. However my mother would never have seen it that way. My mother was a purist about doing the right thing. She would have Daddy move the whole car to another spot before she would steal a good speaker from an imaginary neighbor who had not even arrived yet.
That was my mother.
As the years went on, the speakers disappeared, and the sound came through the radio. We tuned our car to a certain station, and somehow the movie came through the airwaves. I understand this was probably not technically more magical than a speaker hanging on a wire through a window, but it certainly felt more mysterious to me. I could not understand a movie floating through the air on a dark night and landing in our dashboard, but I could understand a cord and a box.
The drive-in was not just a place to watch a movie. That was almost the least of it. There was a playground way down front in Moberly and behind the concession in Macon. Macon’s had one of those merry-go-round contraptions, not the pretty carousel kind with painted horses, but the exciting metal kind where somebody ran around pushing until everyone on it was either delighted, half sick, or terrified. I was fine if my dad was spinning. Of course, I trusted him to the moon and back. If another took control, I was petrified. I knew, even then, other people were not reliable stewards of centrifugal force. My parents usually stayed in the car. My mother, I think, was just a little nervous about the general world outside the car. I was allowed to go play if my dad watched me. That made all the difference. The whole world could change depending on whose eyes were on me.
Later, when I had my own family, the drive-in became blankets spread out in front of the car. That was my favorite way to see a movie. Under the sky. Shoes kicked off. Children wandering back-and-forth to the concession stand. Grown-ups talking too loudly. The giant screen lighting up the Missouri night. One night, some people near us were loud enough that I probably shot my mouth off a little too loud loudly, and one of the men from the other cars came strutting over to our blanket, probably with a little help from alcohol and a lot of help from male foolishness. He asked if we were gonna make him be quiet. The people on my blanket got very quiet. My husband was a strong man. He just stood up and said quietly, “I think we could, but I don’t think we should.”
And that was that. The man went right back where he came from. I have always loved that line. It was not bluster. It was not showing off. It was not a threat exactly. It was simply a statement of available options and good judgment. We could. We shouldn’t. Let’s all choose civilization and finish the movie.
There was buck night. I never got the full value of buck night as an only child, but large families understood its glory. On buck night, a whole carload got in for a dollar. However many people one family could jam into a car counted as one car. I think pickups of people may have gotten in for a dollar, although memory may be exaggerating there. I do remember going with a group of girls in the back of a pickup for somebody’s bunking party, and I’m pretty sure we all got in for a dollar.
For big families buck night was practically a civic blessing. My husband‘s family was large, and I remember going to see Ghostbusters with them that way. We may have filled more than one car. We may even have had to spring for two bucks. My son‘s grandmother was from Germany. She had a delicious accent and a wonderful laugh. At the drive-in, there were metal lawn chairs up near the concession stand, two or three rows of them, where people could sit outside their cars and watch the movie with the sound turned up loud. I always thought I might like to sit there, but I could never quite give up the blanket or the dark car. That night, though, she sat up there, and I could hear her laughing. Ghostbusters was hysterical the first time I saw it. It really was. And hearing her laughter, that shrieking, delighted laugh with her German accent wrapped around it, was half the joy of the movie. Some memories are pictures. Some smells. That one is a sound. Her laughter rising above the cars on a summer’s night.
Another good drive-in night was The Blue Lagoon with Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins. I took my cousin from Indiana, and it rained. We met friends there, and some of them were single, so of course there was that teenage scanning of the crowd. While we were sitting outside, my cousin picked out a boy she thought was cute. They talked a little, flirted a little, nothing that ever became anything. She lived too far away, and her tastes were a little uppity. In a good way, maybe. Later she got into the car with me and watched him walking away. Her eyes got big, and for one moment her beautiful speech slipped into something a little more Indiana-Midwest. She said, “Why come couldn’t we have been born pretty instead of so smart?”
I remember laughing. Not just smiling, laughing a quiet laugh until it finally boiled out of me. At the time, I thought I was probably just about as pretty as I was smart, which is to say I had very little real understanding of either one. It took me years to understand intelligence as anything separate from doing well in school. A good test score never made me feel better than anyone else. I knew I could read. I knew I could write. I knew I could do certain scholastic things. But life smart? Street smart? Smart about choices and people and futures? That was sure a different matter.
I still don’t know that I have ever felt smart in that way. The mistakes and bumbles and wrong turns of life have a way of taking the shine off any pride I might have had. A person can be literate and educated, but she still does not know how to save herself from sorrow. She can know the difference between ITS and IT‘s and still not know which doors will lead to heartache. I do remember my cousin‘s face – young and earnest and funny without meaning to be funny, asking why we couldn’t have been born pretty instead of smart. And I do remember Brooke Shields on that huge screen. I remember light rain on the blanket. I remember being young enough to think the future was still mostly a matter of becoming.
There were so many movies under that sky. I saw King of Kings there. I saw Leaving Normal, with all that scenery and those women heading north toward something they could not quite name. I saw Batman movies there too. The first Batman had a gloss in a style I love. My son picked up Michael Keaton‘s line and used it for years. He would do something amazing, freeze, look over his shoulder, raise his eyebrows and say, “I’m Batman.” Of course he would. That was the beauty of a movie line when it landed in a family. It didn’t stay in the movie. It came home with us; they came part of our homes.
Not every movie deserved to come home. I remember leaving RoboCop 2 in the middle with a carload of boys who were not pleased with me. They had all loved the first RoboCop. One of those little boys was mine. But I sat there watching the sequel get more brutal and uglier by the minute, and I thought, no. I am not going to be the mother who brought these little boys to this. I don’t care how many toys the franchise sold. I don’t care how much my boys loved the first one. We are leaving.
They were protesting, of course; my son was probably embarrassed. Nobody wants his mom to remove the whole car load from the drive-in before the movie is over. I tried to make it worth their while. I’m pretty sure we went for pizza and then went home and played video games and did fun things. Pretty sure they all watched that movie later and wondered what my problem was.
The drive-in was part of school life too. My high school prom group went there, which in retrospect may not have been the finest chaperoning decision in the history of education. Truckloads of teenagers at the drive-in after prom? What could possibly go wrong? My junior year, I remember seeing Anne of the Thousand Days, which is about as non-prom a movie as a person could choose. Nothing says romance like Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Tudor politics, and a doomed woman declaring that her child shall be queen. I loved every minute of it. I was probably not the best date. That movie was just too good. Genevieve Bujould had me completely,“Elizabeth shall be queen!” Or something very close to that, lodged in my mind and never left. So there I was, a prom date, watching a woman lose everything except her claim on history. It was not exactly a slow dance under crepe paper, but I have remembered it all my life.
That is what the drive-in did. It made odd combinations possible. Prom dates and Tudor tragedy. Buck night and Ghostbusters. Rain and the Blue Lagoon. Blankets and submarines on a Hunt for Red October. The sky was the ocean, and I was right there singing in the sonar. Childhood playgrounds and grown-up arguments. German laughter near the concession stand, a husband standing up just enough. A little boy saying, “I’m Batman.” Stands with a Fist and Dances with Wolves.
When the Macon drive-in finally closed, I wrote a letter to one of the owners. I told her what this establishment had symbolized to me. I remember later wishing I had kept a copy of that letter because she told me it had meant so much to her. She had explained that closing was just necessary. I don’t remember all the reasons. I know insurance was a big part of it. It had become simply too hard to keep that old kind of magic alive in this new kind of movie world.
The Macon drive-in had a little concession building set back behind the cars and the tall screen standing out there like a landmark. Macon’s felt like a memory even before it was gone. The title of the last show stayed on the signboard for a while after the movie closed. I don’t remember what it said. I wish I remembered, I wish I had a picture of that. Maybe it was fitting I don’t remember the last movie. The drive-in was never just one movie anyway.
One night long after it closed, a group of us were sitting around a table at Pizza Hut. I remember my dear friend and one of her little girls. Her youngest daughter sat there, and I remember the red and white checkered tablecloth Pizza Hut used to have. All of us were talking excitedly about the drive-in. At some point I asked the little girl, “Did you like the drive-in?”
She said, “I don’t think I ever went to it. I don’t think I ever got to go, did I, mom?”
Her mom looked a little sorry and said that she didn’t think the little girl had ever been to the drive-in. A sudden hush fell over our Pizza Hut table. It was not grief exactly. We knew the child would survive. Children survive missing all kinds of things their elders considered essential. But for that split second, every person of that table felt the weight of it. That little girl had missed the drive in. She had missed the speakers on the windows and the playground in the dusk. She had missed buck night and blankets on the grass. She had missed the concession stand’s glow and the long walk back to the car with popcorn, hotdog, and homemade ice cream sandwiches. She had missed hearing somebody’s grandma laugh above the movie. She had missed rain on the blankets, Batman, bad sequels, good popcorn, mosquito coils, and a strange holiness of watching a giant screen under a real sky. Those checkered tablecloth seem to wait a little while for her to say that she did go once. But she didn’t. And for one suspended second, we did feel sorry for that little girl. Not because her life was ruined. Not because she suffered some terrible deprivation. We felt sorry because a door had closed before we ever knew that it was open.
That’s what happens with certain places. We think they will always be there because they were always there for us. Then one day they close. A tornado takes the screen. The sign goes dark. Or children at a table say they never did that.
And we realize that what felt like ordinary summer was actually not only a rite of passage, it was childhood.
Maybe that is one of the drive-in stays lit in my memory. Not because every movie was good. Some were not. Not because every night was perfectly calm. Some were rainy; some were buggy; some saw loud adults who needed to be invited back into civilization. But the drive-in gave us a way to be together. In cars, on blankets, in pickups, under stars, and the open dark.
It gave us stories.
And if we were lucky, it gave us a dollar carload, a working speaker, a homemade ice cream sandwich, and someone beside us who knew when to laugh, when to hush, and when to stand up and say, “I think we could but I don’t think we should.”
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