HE IS LAYING ON THE GRASS beneath the projector’s beam just outside the concessions bar, his head propped against his wadded-up jacket, watching a blonde boy running through a field in which everything is painted redden-gold by the setting sun, which flares off the lens and makes multicolored circles.
They are celebrating his fifteenth birthday, he and his parents, at the West-end Drive-in, where The Land That Time Forgot is playing with The Legend of Boggy Creek, which no one minds seeing again. It is a new world in which he turns fifteen, a new country. Ronald Reagan has become President of the United States and The Empire Strikes Back has been in theaters for over a year—indoor multiplexes mostly, because the Drive-ins are dying, the victims of higher rental fees (due to mega-blockbust
