There is no graceful way—I realized after inviting
several male friends to go to the drive-in with me—to invite
someone to go to the drive-in with you without implying that you are
going to try to make out with them. Even if you’re not. Which I
wasn’t. I swear. Because if making out is not the point of the
drive-in (oh, you just feel like watching a blurry screen in the
uncomfortable front seat of your foggy, isolated automobile?) then next
you’ll be telling me barfing isn’t the point of drinking, or making
sure we never hang out again isn’t the point of telling me that On
the Road is your favorite book. It is the point. Obviously.
On Sunday night, Auburn’s Valley Drive-In, nestled in an incongruous
valley of green farms and beige business parks, was populated entirely
by frisky teens looking to get fresh under the soothing glow of Kumar’s
diarrhea or Tony Stark’s lady-killing quips. My friend (platonic!) and
I were there to see 88 Minutes—a film I was drawn to,
naturally, by its tasty 6 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Unfortunately, we discovered, 88 Minutes was the second act in a
double feature. First we’d have to sit through Iron Man,
Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, or Forgetting
Sarah Marshall: three movies I’ve already seen. We settled on
Sarah Marshall and parked the car.
Dusk was gorgeous. Mt. Rainier was gorgeous. The tickets were $7.50
apiece. The air was warm. Across the street, a family was playing
volleyball in their front yard. Something—the crunchy gravel, the
nostalgia—made me feel like I was at summer camp. For the first
time in my life, I felt grateful to Auburn for existing.
We walked to the concessions building—clearly built at that
moment in history when people envisioned “the future” as a pastel
pile of rhombuses—and I bought a Polish sausage (rubbery)
from a dude with a ponytail. The teens in the concessions building made
me nervous. I fled outside while my friend went to the bathroom.
“There is a window,” he told me, climbing back in the car a few
minutes later, “from the men’s room [pause] into the concessions
stand. So the first thing you see when you enter the bathroom
[pause] is the fellow who gave you [pause] your hot dog.” Then he
buckled his seat belt. “Why are you doing that?” I asked. “I…
don’t know,” he answered.
The movie was enjoyable enough the second time around. Sometimes it
was hard to pay attention. Sometimes we turned off the crackly sound
and invented our own dialogue. By the time 88 Minutes came on it
was 11 o’clock, and—having no one to make out with—we
bailed. 
