The Times of Our Lives: Dreams ... Audacity ... and Drive-Ins....

History was written this past week ... indeed, has been in continuous composition (and rewrite) since Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama formally announced their candidacies for the Democratic Presidential nomination. For someone who graduated from a segregated high school 45 years ago, at a time when there were less than 500 licensed practicing female attorneys in the State of Texas (many of whom were actually prohibited by misogynistic judges from arguing their own cases in court), the milestones marked in this country, in this election season, have been almost mind-boggling and certainly transcendental, heralding a seismic shift in the zeitgeist and the prevailing demographic. Some would say such things are long past due ... and I am sure that there are many who thought that such things would not be possible during our lifetimes.

We've come a long way from Coach Joe Warren's history class, where it was posited casually by one classmate (and enthusiastically seconded by a couple of others) that "open season" should be declared if Childress High School were integrated ... and from a time when the apex of achievement for a woman was to be a wife and mother, or if one must work, a teacher or a nurse. This past week has been pregnant with history ... and as an unapologetic and unregenerate history junkie, I am giddily cognizant of the strides (and leaps and bounds) it has taken to reach this time and place, and the significance of the journey.

On August 28, 1963, soon after our graduation from CHS, at a time when interracial marriage was still illegal in many states, and when civil rights were not necessarily guaranteed for the poor, the female or the "different", Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his amazing I Have a Dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day ... the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. ... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

King's speech, his eloquent, elegant words delivered with cadenced confidence as he articulated his dream ... stirred and inspired me even then, literally raising goose flesh on my arms as I listened. I still believe it is one of the finest speeches ever made in America, by an American ... right up there with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address ... and Franklin D. Roosevelt's "All we have to fear is fear itself" ... and John F. Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you" ... and Robert F. Kennedy's "I dream things that never were, and ask 'Why not'?"

On Tuesday June 3, Senator Obama attained the number of delegates necessary to become the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party in the November 4 Presidential election. He stands firmly and deservedly on history's stage, despite efforts by some of the savviest, slickest politicians in the business to knock him down, and in spite of spurious, scurrilous e-mail and Internet campaigns generated and kept alive by hate- and fear-mongers, attempting (and unfortunately sometimes, in some dark corners, succeeding) to sell the total hogwash that Senator Obama is a Muslim (he isn't), was schooled in a radical madrassa (he wasn't) and has the middle name "Hussein" (true, but completely irrelevant). One of the most unbelievably ignorant sound bites I heard after the West Virginia Democratic primary was a woman who said she'd voted for Hillary Clinton because Obama's middle name was "Hussein" and she'd had enough of "HOOO-sane" ... as if she would have been voting for Saddam Hussein. Jeez ... get a grip ... a clue ... maybe a book or two.... But I digress....

In the interests of full disclosure, it is incumbent upon me to tell you that I have been inspired by Senator Obama ever since I heard him give the keynote address at the Democratic Convention on July 27, 2004 in Boston. I was absolutely transfixed by his The Audacity of Hope speech:

Hope -- Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope! In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation. A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead. I believe that we can give our middle class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity. I believe we can provide jobs to the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair. I believe that we have a righteous wind at our backs and that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices, and meet the challenges that face us.

Until July 2004 I had never heard of Barack Obama. But as I watched and listened to him, felt his almost tangible "connection" with his audience and drank in his soaring words and moving thoughts, a shiver ran through me. I turned to Yahn and announced: "You're going to think I'm crazy, but I believe I am looking at the next President of the United States." Yahn gave me one of his indulgent smiles (he is used to my enthusiasms as well as my prognostications), and opined that although it had been a wonderful speech, it was highly unlikely that an unknown biracial (black) man would rise from relative obscurity in four short years to become a serious contender for the Presidency ... particularly with Hillary Clinton already none too subtly warming up in the wings. I even conceded then that Yahn was probably right ... I had just taken a wild notion ... and yet I could not shake the intense feeling that had possessed me....

Fittingly and symmetrically, absent some unforeseen circumstance, Senator Obama will accept the nomination of his party on August 28, the 45th anniversary of King's speech....

It is also more than worthy of note that Senator Clinton came very close to becoming the first woman to be the Presidential nominee of a major political party, making the possibility of a female President within our lifetimes more than just wishful thinking.

Anniversaries were also marked this past week, three of them occurring on June 6:

★ 64 years from D-Day, the heroic invasion by U.S. and British troops of the beaches of Normandy, which with Russian advances on the Eastern Front ultimately sealed the fate of Nazi Germany and its deranged leader, Adolf Hitler (any mention of which was oddly absent from the national newscasts I watched);

★ 40 years since the death by assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who sought to bring an end to the controversial war in Vietnam; and

★ on a more whimsical note, the 75th anniversary of the opening of the first drive-in movie theater in Camden, New Jersey.

I haven't been to a drive-in for literally decades and in fact there are precious few remaining (although I understand the one in Clarendon is still open on weekends). But I have memories of the Drive-In outside Childress, which figured prominently in my childhood and adolescence. It was a treat almost every summer weekend to go to the Drive-In, either packing sandwiches and snacks, or indulging in the cholesterol-laden, greasy yet irresistible offerings from the concession stand. Sometimes we'd spread a quilt on the hood of the car, or on the ground, and watch the movie of the moment under those "Deep in the Heart of Texas" stars. The girls and I also roamed the "aisles" talking and gossiping, checking out the carloads of the guys cruising back and forth, checking us out in return.



The Drive-In double features served up horror films like Teenagers from Outer Space (featuring a dead lobster as the "monster" and taglines such as "Thrill-Crazed Space Kids on a Ray Gun Rampage!!!") ... and Gorgo (the mother-monster just wanted her baby back!) ... and Godzilla and Mothra and various combinations and permutations thereof ... including arguably the most egregiously awful movie of all time, 1958's Plan 9 From Outer Space. Conceived and directed by the notorious Edward D. Wood, Jr., featuring (among others) Maila "Vampira" Nurmi and Tor Johnson, the film gave star billing to Bela Lugosi, the "classic" Dracula before Christopher Lee (and later Frank Langella ... sigh) came along. Lugosi had fallen on really hard times when he agreed to do Plan 9, and gave up the ghost (literally) after filming one scene ... possibly after seeing the first rushes ... so the filmmakers improvised by having a stand-in skulk around behind a cloak for the rest of the movie, and by culling and interspersing shots from Lugosi's earlier films.

There was the usual line-up of teen-targeted hormonaganzas like Because They're Young (taken from John Farris' cheesy novel Harrison High, starring Dick Clark as a teacher and Michael Callan as the good-looking but severely troubled bad boy), High School Confidential with Russ Tamblyn and John Drew Barrymore (son of John, father of Drew), Drag Strip Girl with John Ashley (a perennial of the genre and briefly a husband of one of the Gidgets), and the testosterone-fueled Thunder Road, starring Robert Mitchum (who also sang the title song). I also remember seeing Alfred Hitchcock's controversial blockbuster Psycho there, since Phipps-Layton Theaters' managment considered it too risque (with Janet Leigh's putatively nude shower murder scene) to be screened at the downtown Palace. Like many people, it was years after that film before I was able to take a shower without locking and barricading the bathroom door.

The last drive-in I attended was the old three screen (!!!!) Jupiter in Dallas during the early years of Yahn's and my marriage. For the princely sum of $1.00 a carload on weekends, we could go and watch (mostly bad) movies all night long (the "From Dusk to Dawn" marathons that inspired Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino to riff on the gimmick with their 1996 vampire flick starring George Clooney). We saw such memorable fare as Count Yorga, Vampire, and Night of the Living Dead, which scared the bejabbers out of me (something about those implacable, mindless, robotic, hungry zombies ... brrrrrr), Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns, James Bond films, Avalon-Funicello Beach Party romps, and laughable "counter-cultural" fever-dream embarrassments like The Trip, starring Peter Fonda, concocted and produced by middle-aged, middle-brow film executives hoping to tap into the energy of the youthquake.

One Friday night in 1970, we headed for the Jupiter, having determined that the principal offerings presented separately but equally on each of the main screens were Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Two Mules for Sister Sara and Born Losers. As we turned onto the property, we saw the separate marquees for the diverse screens ... offering the (one word) designation with directional arrows pointing the way for ... Apes ... Mules ... or Losers.... We fell out laughing ... but I still haven't decided whether the marquees were just signs ... or some sort of weird, cosmic Dostoyevskian judgment....

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