Poem for the day: Monday, May 23, 2005

This is from my new book, coming out next month, "The Morgantown Suite Poems":

Making Out at the Blue Horizon


A private luxury suite for two in the back
While the couple in the front had to make do
With the hump that all but forced them
To go horizontal at first kiss.
Be it Ricky Nelson or Don Knotts or Linda Blair
We weren’t there for the entertainment
Being projected on the screen,
But what passed between teenaged lovers
Trying hard to find out what they weren’t
Supposed to be teaching us about
In Mrs. Watts' biology class.


William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.
www.cityoflegends.com
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To explain and expand:

Near Morgantown there were three Drive-In Theaters...the Westover, the Maple Leaf and the Blue Horizon.

The Westover was more of a family place, and the Maple Leaf was the local passion pit...but they ticked me off when Reagan was shot and they ran a festival of Jody Foster films, each one renamed to be more prurient ("Carny" became "Carnival Tease", for instance) and billed her as "the woman men would kill for". So I don't give them any more props than I have to...although I did see "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken" there, which featured Morgantown's own Don Knotts, as well as "Love and Kisses" with Ricky Nelson.

I worked briefly as an usher at a local cinema that was owned by the same guy who owned the Blue Horizon, and one of my jobs was to change the marquee weekly. Regardless of weather. And I worked there during the winter...I did it once during an ice storm. No fun, and he was a major horse's rectum.

Mrs. Watts was my 10th grade bio teacher, and I got the sense she wasn't comfortable doing the "sex education" portion of the curriculum. In my class she assigned that to the totally babe student teacher. It was...interesting. But more about that some other time.

I only double dated once at the drive in. I drove. The backseat couple got the most privacy, for sure...and I was only on the date as a condition of my cousin going out with a friend of my brother's...and I had zero interest in this girl. So we sat stiffly in the front seat while the noises from the back seat were barely drowned out by the movie. A little later on I loaned my car to my brother to go to the drive in, and it came back with damage to the vent controls on the dash...clearly caused by people maneuvering around "the hump".

Tsk tsk.