the happiest place on earth

a few make the claim that disneyland and disneyworld, esp. corporation disney, is the happiest place on earth. nah-uh. the happiest place is at the drive-in watching movies under a scrim of stars and eating foods and snacks that are so bad for you they make the blood coagulate to a sturdy gel.

as james wright said in a poem, i've eaten the first fruit of the season and i am in love. the first fruit is the first trip to the drive-in. it was warm enough today but when the sun dropped below the horizon it got pretty chilly. nicholas and i bundled up for the occassion. i am fortunate to share my love of the cinema under the stars with nicholas because the sac 6 drive-in theaters is still open for business while most drive-in theaters are just a whisp of a memory. the owners, west wind, have done a damn fine job of taking the old girl and loving her back to relative health. the place is still shabby but it is clean and the bathrooms, which were until a few years ago, unspeakable, are clean with working stalls and urinals. trust me, the old owners had let the drive-in go to seed where it was more than an expectation that the building and the sceens would just crumble into the dirt it sat on.

it is still early in the season and tho the drive-in is open year-round it doesn't get into full operating mode until the weather gets warmer. tonight nicholas had the playground to himself and i dropped a many few dollars into the video games for the boy to play. i need a witness, baby, for that boy was just beside himself with glee.

the movies? for me at the drive-in those are almost a secondary experience. the foremost is the ambiance. nicholas was on the swings when the films started to roll. the projection booth sits on top of the snack bar that is round in shape and is center to the theater's 6 screens. i suspected there is only one projectionist and my suspicion was confirmed, i think, upon seeing the screens light up in sequence. then i looked up at the booth and saw the projectionist in the window at work cueing up the reels and told nicholas to watch too. i wonder what the projectionist might've thought of a grown silver-haired man watching him with utter delight when he looked down and saw me see him.

but for the movies the first run was tim burton's turn at alice in wonderland, an interesting interpretation of the classic. cgi is so sophisticated that it is damn-near difficult to see the seams of the art. the movie sort of sags in parts, and is a bit more violent than i'd have expected -- it's not bloody at all but the red queen's viciousness is put in bold -- yet the great johnny depp is a miracle of gestures. that alone is worth the price of admission.

the second film was a romantic comedy starring kristen bell, she of the tv show veronica mars. i didn't catch the name of the film and it would take only a couple of clicks now to find out but no matter. the flick was so formulaic all the producer would need to do to get the script is to punch the boy-meets-girl theme into a software program and add the wrinkle that the girl gets entanglements thru the agency of a fountain in rome that caters to the wishes of forlorn lovers.

why we stayed for the second flick? because it was the drive-in! we missed nearly half of the movie already because we were at the playground and snack bar playing video games. by the time we got back to the car i thought, oh what the hell. bell is a pleasant enough actor and the ensemble was good-looking and game. and there was one pretty funny sequence that nearly redeemed the whole of the movie. don't get me wrong, i do like chick flicks, esp. romantic comedies, but this one seemed made only for money? really i don't know why it was made only that it exists and i have seen it. 'nuff said.