First:
The drive-in experience is not, at its core, about the movie, or a cheap date, or even tradition. It's about people choosing to commune during their off hours _ an act of defiance, if you will, against the modern world's tide of isolation.
Second:
Time can, at least for an evening, stand comfortingly still.
The 1950s start at the box office.
It resembles a toll booth, where the faithful cue up before showtime (i.e., whenever dusk falls) in their Chevy Tahoes, Buick Rendezvouses, Volkswagon Beetles and Ford F150s.
Like as not, Judy Crews, 68, and Alice Plumlee, 48, will step out and put a big smile in your car window.
Crews is the plumper of the pair, calm as a gavel, with a shy squint and uncalculating charm that wins over even the strawberry pickers who haven't quite mastered the language she speaks.
She's run projectors, fixed popcorn machines, carbonators and septic tanks, filled potholes and pulled weeds. Her first drive-in experience: a $3-a-night job, working the register of an outdoor theater in Orlando.
That was in 1958, when drive-ins were at their zenith and 5,000 dotted the American landscape. Crews has been working the Silver Moon box office going on 12 years now.
"It's my life," she says. "I didn't get married until I was 48 because I was so married to the theaters, working 60, 80 hours a week." At the Silver Moon, she says, "you're not just furniture _ you're people."
Plumlee, a registered dental hygienist in Lakeland for 26 years, came to the Silver Moon two years ago, looking to make some extra spending money.
"It's about as opposite from a clinical setting as you can get. That's what attracts me to this place. I mean, you get to know the people who come out," she says.
When the Silver Moon opened on April 14, 1948, with 357 state-of-the-art RCA speakers and a 35-cent admission, the snack bar stood near the entrance. Vendors also circulated among the cars, bringing hook-on trays with licorice, root beer, sandwiches and cigarettes. You don't get window service anymore, but patrons can tote along homemade beverages and snacks.
Like a candlelit pumpkin in a dark field, the snack stand offers a coziness _ and a list of staples _ that draws you in. Of course, some folks simply come to chew the fat.
Here, in the glow of the frankfurter rotisserie and the vintage, neon "Starlight Movies ... in color!!!" wall clock, customer Clarence Farmer, a 47-year-old construction superintendent from Birmingham, Alabama, waits.
"People don't realize what they lose when they lose a drive-in," he says. "It's a cultural thing. My dad used to take my mom to the drive-in all the time." Then, in a lower voice: "I might have been a bright idea that started in the back seat of Dad's car."
