A date at the drive-in

THE best time I ever had at a drive-in movie was with my dog.

I’m a little sorry to be putting this down on paper, because my mother believes the best time I ever had at a drive-in was with her. We went to see “Gone With the Wind” when I was maybe 13, just before I hit the age at which I was mortified to be seen in the same hemisphere with my parents.

That was fun, sure. But nothing like a double feature with a cocker spaniel.

Of course it was summer. Have drive-ins ever been open in winter, even here? Maybe so. Maybe people go in January to one of the handful left here, bundling up in anoraks as if the car were a ski lodge on wheels. I hope not. A drive-in movie in January is a crime against nature, like football in July.

Southern California has two summers. During first summer, the twilight fog crowds out the heat so suddenly that you half-expect little thunderstorms to form somewhere around shoulder-high.

My date with my dog was in the second summer, when the sunny heat never really lifts. It just sublimates into darkness -- dark heat instead of bright heat. That’s when you go to the drive-in, when the air can be so sweaty the mosquitoes could do the backstroke.

The first drive-in opened in 1933, in New Jersey. The last is likely to close a few years from now, unless some preservationists manage to get one protected as a monument to car culture. They’ll put tape-looped B-horror flicks on the screen and fill the rows with parked Hummers and muscle cars.

Even when you were 16 and believed you’d go on forever, you knew the drive-in wouldn’t. The drive-in is like the American West, moving too swiftly into legend, destined to last longer in our imaginations than in reality. The postage stamp honoring the drive-in movie shows a cowboy on a horse on-screen, a mythology within a mythology.

Wasn’t there a drive-in scene in “American Graffiti”? In “Twister”? Hadn’t the Clutter girl planned to go to a drive-in movie with her boyfriend the night the “In Cold Blood” killers came to her house on the Kansas prairie? Sumner Redstone worked for his father’s drive-ins, and he grew up to run Viacom. People got engaged at drive-ins. People got knocked up at drive-ins.

The evening in question, there was no steamy coupling in my back seat. My date was my dog. It was a retro double feature -- Woody Allen, his early, funny movies.

Skazka was a dog I’d taken off the hands of a couple of old sisters about to sign themselves into a nursing home. She was stubborn. Smart. A good listener. And a huge Woody Allen fan.

My car was a Honda hatchback. Not long thereafter, it was destined to get hit on the 55 Freeway and land upside down. It was a perfect car for the drive-in. I’d back it into the space and open up the hatchback onto a private VistaVision wide screen. No windshield between us and the movie. The audio came from all around, from the speakers hanging on everyone else’s car windows. (These days, the Dolby audio comes through your own radio.)

You can get busted for smuggling a box of Junior Mints into the cineplex, but at the drive-in, grazing rights have always prevailed. Usually I brought my own -- popcorn, red licorice, maybe some of the dreadful wine cooler that you could always swear you didn’t know was actual alcohol. A couple of dog chews. It beat going to the concession stand.

We had packed the hatchback with pillows. I fluffed and piled, and we hunkered down. Skaz always perked up at the cartoons, especially if dogs barked or cats yowled.

Between features, I took her for a little relief stroll, and by the time Woody Allen was waking up in “Sleeper” to a future where steak and sour cream were good for you, my little dog girl was sound asleep, her head in my lap.

The trickiest bit at the drive-in is knowing when to leave. You don’t want to miss the ending, but you don’t want to get stuck in the endless line of cars.

If you’ve seen the movie already -- and I had -- you could turn on the ignition and creep down the row, lights off, before everyone else is waking up and arranging their clothing and dumping the empties. Or if you were to stay for the end, and time it just right, when the screen begins to go dark, before engines gun to life and headlights blaze like the Manhattan skyline, there are a few, a very few moments, when, even in Southern California, you might look straight up and see stars.

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Patt Morrison is a columnist for Opinion, and a dog and movie fan.

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You can still catch a show at these Southern California drive-ins:

Vineland Drive-In, 443 N. Vineland Ave., Industry, (626) 961-9262. $7.50 per person, 11 and younger free.

Mission Tiki Drive-In, Ramona Avenue and Mission Boulevard, Montclair, (909) 627-3564. $6 per person, 9 and younger free. (No pets allowed.)

Van Buren Cinema 3, 3035 Van Buren Blvd., Riverside, (951) 688-2360. $6 per person, 9 and younger free.

Rubidoux Drive-In Theatre, 3770 Opal St., Riverside, (951) 683-4455. $6 per person, 9 and younger free. (No dogs allowed.)