Have some fun

The prompt is "have some fun," and enumerates movie theater, playhouse, arcade, music hall.
I chose to depict the last drive-in theater in the San Fernando Valley, the Van Nuys Drive-in. When it closed, it was the end of an era.

Kids today will never have the experience of piling into the back seat of the family car in their pajamas and driving with their parents to a big empty lot filled with painted parking spaces and short posts with detachable speaker boxes to see the latest movies on a giant screen lighting up the darkness. They will miss out on the swearing as their father tries to affix the speaker box to the rolled-down driver's window with a contrary clip that doesn't quite fit their car, and then complains about the staticky sound reception. They will never know the unbelievable thrill of being allowed to leave the car to journey halfway across the lot to the snack bar for popcorn and Coke. They won't remember falling asleep before the end of the movie and waking up as they are carried into the house to their beds. Of course, they also won't, as teenagers, have the experience of getting arrested for bringing in liquor, or make the mistake of begetting babies in that same back seat....

The Van Nuys Drive-in was a Pacific theater, opening on July 30, 1948 with the double bill of "Buffalo Bill" and "Wings of the Morning." The theater lot had a capacity of 891 cars, until it was subdivided into a tri-plex drive-in in June of 1983. Pacific Theatres closed the drive-in on September 2, 1996, leaving the message "closed for the season" on its marquee, but that season never arrived. The theater was demolished in the late 1990s.

This is one place I actually remember for myself; my then-husband Chuck and I moved to Van Nuys in our early 20s in 1981, and occasionally packed a root beer, a sandwich, and some peanut M&Ms and took in a double feature from the (front) seat of Chuck's old green station wagon. Although the sound was bad and the angle at which you had to hold your neck in order to get a proper view of the screen occasionally problematic depending on where you parked, there was nothing like watching a movie sitting on a comfortable upholstered bench seat but with all your windows rolled down to let in the warm summer evening. You could hear the distant murmur of other conversations and see the far-off group milling around the concession stand between movies, but you were alone in your own little world. The closest thing to this nowadays is the picnic-style movies they show starting at dusk at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, about which I have mixed feelings!

Pencil, micron pens, watercolor, in Bee sketchbook.