Good Old Mom and Dad let me spend Labor Day weekend on the farm!

i mention to Aunt Mattie and Uncle Philbert during dinner how i had missed The Dark Night and now it’s gone and i’ll have to wait for the dvd but i didn’t want the dvd i wanted to see it on a BIG screen and boy that sounds whiny when you write it down.

But Uncle Philbert doesn’t say quitcher bellyachin’. He just gets a funny look and says if i wanted to see it on a big screen i was gonna see it on a big screen. So he piles us all into the car and refuses to believe me when i say it’s too late, it’s gone from all the cineplexes.

Next thing you know we’re driving the opposite direction from the mall and out into the country and he pulls into a big parking lot with a DRIVE IN movie screen at one end. It’s ancient and peeling and as big as a house.

“How’s that for big?” asks Uncle P with a smirk while he hands the lady at the ticket booth a $5 bill and asks for tickets and a big popcorn and then sticks out his hand like he’s waiting for change. When the ticket lady says that’ll be $20 more, he makes a sound like he stepped on a wasp nest.

Uncle P: Since when do you have to mortgage the farm to see a moving picture?
Aunt M: Now Bert [she calls him Bert] you kind of owe it to Batman to support his film. If it weren’t for him, you wouldn’t have a farm to mortgage. [I can’t explain this, it’s in the book.]
Me: When was the last time you went to a movie?
Uncle P: 1952. Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers in “Monkey Business.” Don’t remember much because Mattie and I were getting’up to our own monkey--
Aunt M: Oh, look, the picture’s starting. Who wants popcorn?

They let me lie on the hood, all wrapped in a blanket and warm from the engine’s heat, resting my head on the windshield and whenever I turned around to look at them Uncle P was looking pop-eyed and Aunt M was hiding behind the giant thing of popcorn. Still, it was an awesome way to watch a Batman movie.

Any of you guise ever been to a drive in?