Nothing like several inches of snow to make one wax
nostalgic for the carefree days of summer.
One of the things I think about when casting back to hot temperatures
and extended sunshine is drive-in movies.
Yes, I am that old.
Truthfully, my family didn’t go to drive-ins as a summer
time treat. Dad would watch movies every
once in a while but they didn’t make movies like Red River anymore so he wasn’t
all that interested. Mom could tell you
where she sat and what she was wearing when she saw Ben Hur in the theater but
she didn’t want to go. My experience
with the bygone movie presentation was as a worker.
At the end of my sophomore year in high school a friend
invited me to work with him at the Airport Drive-In (give yourself 50 bonus
points if you ever went to a movie there).
At that time there were two drive-ins in the area, the Airport and the
South Hutch. The South Hutch played
movies you could take the whole family to for a wholesome evening of
entertainment. The Airport….didn’t.
Our specialties were four movie marathons featuring one of
two things, crazed men wielding chainsaws, knives, machetes, or really pointy
sticks (not all of them were very bright) or women wearing short shorts, tiny
bikinis, spandex or cheerleader outfits (at least until they changed into the
tiny bikinis). Now don’t worry, I was
safely sheltered from these films which could poison the young innocence of a
bright eyed high school boy because I worked in the concession stand. (On second thought you don’t get 50 bonus
points if you ever went to a movie there. You should probably have points
deducted, or simply think better of admitting it to anyone.)
It really was a great job.
The manager was an older lady who would mother all of the high school
aged workers. We all got along. Most of us were friends before and after the
job and my cousin Kevin even met his future and still current wife working
there.
There were three basic roles at the theater. The box office: This was almost always a girl who sat out in
the tiny little “house” at the entry gate selling tickets to the degener…uh,
customers. The concession staff: These were the hard-working stiffs popping
popcorn, frying up burgers and shilling the sodas. The ramp man:
This was the guy who was charged with walking the ramps, that is the
inside vernacular for where all the cars parked to tilt ever so slightly
upwards to look at the screen, in order to keep order and catch people who
tried to drive in via the exit and charge them for admission.
Now for a peek behind the curtain of that mysterious and
mostly extinct exotic workplace the drive in.
The concession stand had its standards for the food it
served. These standards may or may not
have been the ones suggested by the health department. We would bag up any leftover popcorn in a big
trash bag to be used the next night. The
rule of thumb was if you carefully took a single popped kernel of corn and
gently bit down on it with just the maxillary and mandibular central incisors
and heard a squeaking sound the popcorn was officially too old to sell. Also, yesterday’s hamburgers became today’s
cheeseburgers, the cheese covered up the bits of bun which had stuck to the
hamburger patty as we prepped them for cryogenic preservation (stuck them in
the freezer) for the next day.
In our defense the clientele was not possessing of highly
discerning palates. We would often laugh
at the people who would purchase popcorn tubs big enough to transport a defecting
family of Cubans to Key West with extra buttery flavored oil (that is what we
were required to offer the customers – why there was a pang of remorse on the
part of the company asking us to exercise some truth in advertising on this
matter while doing all the other stuff we did was beyond me) multiple hot dogs
and hamburgers, a package of Twizzlers, a package of Corn Nuts (the loudest
foodstuff ever devised by man) a package of Milk Dud (it was not a package of
Milk Duds because the air conditioning didn’t work so well in the storage room
and the individual candies had coagulated into one giant Dud) and then yell at
us because we didn’t carry any diet soda.
Christopher Pyle will
be checking with his lawyer about the statute of limitations on certain actions
and possibly share more drive-in information in his next column. He can be reached at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.
