Tag Archive for: drive-in movies

The Mating Game

/in /by


Listening to son number three rant about the dating scene made me realize that even if it’s been a million years since I was unattached, first dates are still the pits.

A recent example.

He’d met an interesting woman who was a friend of a friend of a friend. They’d chatted by phone, exchanged a couple of emails, and agreed to meet for a drink. This generation – and I just aged myself by a hundred years, but at least I didn’t refer to them as the young un’s – don’t want to invest any real time or money in a first date. You meet in a public location, just for drinks or coffee so it’s a limited time frame, and if worse comes to worse, you check your Blackberry and announce that you have to go back to work because of an unexpected crisis. Who’s going to argue in this economy when work calls?

From what I understand, the meet and greet over beers went well, they shared a few laughs, discovered they both like films, and before the evening ended, agreed to go to a movie.

Danger, Will Robinson.

The movie you choose can mean the difference between marriage and a lonely life of celibacy.

Ever the gentleman (I raised him well), he permitted the young woman to choose the flick. Now, if I had been advising her, there are a couple of parameters I would have suggested in choosing a film for a first date.

1. Skip all Chick flicks.
We may all be able to recite verbatim numerous scenes from Steel Magnolias and have the soggy tissues to show for it, but if the movie has the girl dying for love, it’s a pass for a first or even fifth date.

2. Pass on any movie with subtitles.
Sure there are lots of fabulous films made in Japan, Italy, France – but at this point, you’d like subtitles for what your date really means when he says, “I’ll call you.”

3. Avoid at all costs any films that have an IMPORTANT message.
AKA, you’ll walk out depressed because life sucks and there’s no point in even hoping that there is a happy ending to, well, anything because men are pigs.

Here’s what happened. They met at 9:30 pm for a quick coffee and cupcake. So far, so good. Sure it’s late for me, but they’re young. The movie was at 10 and it was a World War II movie in a frozen tundra with Nazis – not a lot of laughs to say the least. In fact, not only did many of the good guys die in the film, but the epilogue then made clear that even those who survived suffered more tragedies in life.

As he pointed out, you’re not supposed to end a first date thoroughly depressed. Since it was midnight and both had early meetings for work the next day, they parted within fifteen minutes — never to meet again.

What the worst first date you ever had?

Evelyn David

P.S. We’ve been Kindle-d. Murder Off the Books is now available in Kindle format. Murder Takes the Cake will not be published in paperback until May, but is already available in Kindle format. TechnologyRUs!

Slippery Things

/in /by

Sometimes you lose them forever. Sometimes you just misplace them. Sometimes they aren’t real.

Memories are slippery, amorphous creatures that wiggle through our fingers and disappear under the bed with all the glowing eyed monsters, single rogue socks, and books that are never where you left them.

Unlike other people who profess to remember early life experiences, I’ve never been convinced that I have “real” memories of my life before age four. I have photographs implanted in my mind of events – images that come from actual photographs, home movies, or relatives’ retelling of events. But real memories at ages two or three? I don’t think so. Not me.

Drive-in movie theaters populated the landscape when I was a preschooler. I have a distinct memory of a long car trip from California to Oklahoma. My family was moving home, back to Oklahoma, pulling a trailer, with only enough money for gas and not much else. My dad drove straight through. I lay on a mattress in the packed backseat (remember when cars were big enough you could put mattresses in the backseat?). Level with the windows, I had a 360 degree view of the sky. I remember a string of drive-in movie screens that I could see from my makeshift bed.

I know the trip was real. I know we drove at night. And I also know that no one took photographs and told me about the drive-in movie screens. The adults would have had no reason to talk to me about the flickering images seen from the highway. No one but a bored preschooler would have been fascinated by the quick peeks at scenes from movies as we passed by.

It’s strange to think that my first real memory might have been scenes from B movies. Images moving on a screen without sounds or endings.

That night I discovered the power – I could make up my own stories.

Other people claim to have memories of events at a much earlier age. Maybe they’re real memories. Maybe as a toddler I was just so self-absorbed that I didn’t pay much attention to what was going on around me. To some extent I’ve always lived in my head. From my enthrallment with my grandmother’s stories of talking mice families living in her house, to my discovery of entire worlds hidden in books, to the miraculous glory of movies, I had found a way to leave the here and now. I could be anyone, travel anywhere, and change anything that I wanted – whenever I wanted.

In my mind, I could rewrite the endings to those books, television shows, and movies so that the main characters not only rode off into the sunset together, but had lives afterward. I added scenes that happened after the credits rolled, after the last page was turned. In my mind I wrote the epilogue, the years after Shane came back, the rebuilding of Tara, and the marriage of Candy and Jeremy long after the cancellation of Here Comes the Brides.

About five years ago, with the encouragement of Marian, my co-author and friend, I began putting scenes on paper. The words I heard in my head became dialogue between people I created. The people did what I told them to do.

It was magic. It was powerful.

It was another form of what I’d always done.

Or at least that’s my memory of it.

Evelyn David