This angers some residents, who say the Walmart seems to have become a “done deal” before anyone outside government had heard a word about it. Maryville leaders say the firm developing the site for a Walmart has met all rules and requirements, so free enterprise will determine which businesses survive. (The online petition garnered 13,255 signatures before it was closed.) Drive-in owner Doug Freeman says light pollution from the planned Walmart parking lot will doom his business by washing out the screen. The Coopers are among thousands to sign petitions, either at the Parkway Drive-In or online, seeking to protect the business from a prospective Walmart next door. “There are so few drive-in theaters any more. “I cannot imagine it with a Walmart next door,” says Gabriel’s mom, Rose Cooper. (Little kids get in free.) “Splish Splash” is playing on the transistor radio the Coopers rented for a dollar from the concession stand-just one more service the drive-in provides, in this case accommodating those who like to listen to their movies under the stars instead of behind a windshield. His 4-year-old daughter has made a new best friend a few cars down. “It’s the perfect cliché of Americana.”Īt his feet sits his toddler son on a blanket, gnawing a corn dog with intense concentration. “All this,” says Gabriel Cooper, the sweep of his arm indicating the teenage girls playing lacrosse and little boys walloping each other with foam swords among about 50 kids in the grass at the foot of the movie screen. Why come here instead of the movieplex with surround sound? Why haul the family 30 minutes or, in some cases, an hour to the drive-in? Four hundred cars can fit, but some nights they have to turn folks away. The double (or triple) feature won’t start until it’s good and dark, maybe 9 o’clock or later, but the gates open at 7. Or maybe your perfect spot is that far corner where there’s enough privacy for discreetly engaging in time-honored drive-in traditions. Maybe it’s the spot close to the cement-block concession stand, where, if you wait in a complex system of lines understood only by the initiated, your reward is a patty melt or a Frito pie, or even a bucket of popcorn for a jaw-dropping $2.50. Maybe your perfect spot is next to the dad holding his infant daughter through the moon roof for the tallest perspective of her life. The headlights creep among the parked cars, past the pickup where kids pile onto an air mattress covered in fluffy comforters, past the teenage girls taking selfies and the family setting up a playpen in the grass, past a card table surrounded by weathered-looking smokers playing poker, until they illuminate that perfect spot. They inch past the tiny ticket booth (one adult, two first-run movies: $7) and a tractor stalled just off the gravel track.ĭrive past, into the past. Just outside Maryville on East Lamar Alexander Parkway, the shining row of headlights files slowly past the checkered sign for the Parkway Drive-In. I t’s a Saturday night, and the cars are lining up at the drive-in.
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