Thinking in the drive-in is the beginning of the end

“Want to see ‘Out of Africa’ at the Winnetka Drive-In?” my companion asked.

“I haven’t been to a drive-in in years, “ I answered, promptly tumbling into the rabbit hole of the past.

My last movie-in-a-car was before I could vote. There was a war going on in Vietnam then, but it wasn’t much of a war unless you happened to be fighting it. Still in high school, my cohort saw no further than the senior prom, which promised to be either the New Frontier or the Great Depression, depending on your date. We were at an age (not the last) of utter self-absorption, when sarcasm was perceived as the highest art form. We spent our lunch hours attempting to look perfect while lobbing verbal hand grenades.

Cynical as only the inexperienced can be, we were also extraordinarily romantic. We believed our lockerside liaisons would endure forever, a remarkable delusion given that most couples hadn’t even applied to the same colleges. We, the girls anyway, were regularly moved to tears by the lyrics of the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”--a song that makes sense only for that brief time, called adolescence, when the odds of holding hands all night with your beloved are roughly the same as your chances of being teleported to the moon.

Because the sofa in the family living room was as private as the Ventura Freeway, my first boyfriend and I went to the drive-in as often as possible.

We always chose our parking spot according to simple but strict criteria. We liked to be off to the side of the lot where there was a bad view of the screen. We avoided direct lighting and cars with police officers or children in them.

Cops were to be shunned, obviously, because they were armed with flashlights. We had nothing against children per se, beyond not wanting to start any that evening. But we knew that children sometimes meandered while following the directive of the singing candy bar that appeared on the screen from time to time to urge, “Let’s all go to the snack bar.”

A sufficiently curious child might momentarily forget his junkie’s need for Milk Duds and--heaven forfend--peer into the windows of my beloved’s father’s two-tone Chevrolet. Thus, we might become the drive-in’s feature attraction, bringing shame on ourselves, our families and our suburban high school for generations to come and making my father really mad.

I remember that last visit to the drive-in on several counts. For the first time in months, I did not once say “Please don’t” in a voice so sultry it should have carried a warning label. As mysteriously as love or thrall or whatever I was in had come, it went, right there in the car to the tune of “Let’s all go to the snack bar.” Suddenly unburdened and unfogged, I began noticing things in the outside world.

Since the outside world was a drive-in, that was a mixed blessing. There were lots of unsatisfactory things to notice. I had never realized, for example, that the speaker gave off random squawks and other nasty jungle noises. Who had cared before about the speaker? Until that night, hanging it on the car window had simply been an early step in the glorious ritual that led to “Please don’t.”

That night, perhaps for the first time, I looked at the screen and discovered that there was actually a movie being shown up there. At some level, I had previously assumed that kindly drive-in managers simply advertised the names of current films so that young regulars like ourselves could synchronize their stories when their parents asked them later, “How was the movie, dear?” or, even trickier, “What movie did you see?”

None of us intended to waltz home after four sweaty hours of car-seat aerobics and announce: “Gee, Dad, we didn’t actually see anything. Spent the whole evening making out like bandits.”

No, no, no. Parents at both homes heard the same comforting lie in the form of a movie title, the name of a film that had hardly been heard, let alone viewed. One long, hot, near-perfect summer, we got away with the same insipid musical at least three times. It had been highly recommended by church groups and the PTA, organizations apparently unaware that the longer and duller a movie was the more effectively it functioned as an occasion of sin.

That night, after blindly patting the car seat for several minutes, I put my glasses back on long before the drive home. I was not only cognizant of the fuzzy ballet of underlighted images on the screen, I was appalled. “Really lousy projection,” I commented non-sultrily to my date. He had never known me to think in the drive-in before and could not have been more surprised had I begun juggling or speaking Armenian.

A wise lad, as well as a great kisser, he knew long before I did that thinking in the drive-in is the beginning of the end. He was the first to start humming “Breaking up is hard to do.”

I had a question for my friend before committing myself to a movie at the Winnetka Drive-In.

“Does ‘Please don’t’ mean anything to you?” I asked.

“Please don’t what?” he answered.

We decided to stay home.