When I was nine, with vague prepubescent cravings also beginning their tidal flows, we moved to Tucson, where my parents discovered drive-ins. Although I saw Gone With the Wind and several other classics with my sisters or friends indoors at the Catalina Theater, the Frontier Drive In was the setting for some of my happiest childhood moments. All five of us together, and my father even seemed to enjoy himself. My youngest sister Trisha sat in the front seat between my parents, and Liza and I had the whole back seat to ourselves. One summer night rain drops began plopping on the windshield as the opening credits began. For once I did not relish the smell of dust being moistened, was miserable that a thunderstorm shut down the movie and drove us home to the separate rooms of our four-square house.

But Singin’ in the Rain was not rained out. Gene Kelly’s famous dance sequence with the umbrella lightened my sense of my body so that, even today, simply remembering the scene, I want to begin a little imitative loose-limbed toe-heel-toe, although I never had a toe or tap lesson in my life (and would not want anyone, even Steve, to watch). High Society I saw with my mother’s cousin. Periodically, Dick would drive up from his home in Guadalajara in an aging black Cadillac, covered in dust by the time he swung into our driveway, calling out for my mother, and raucously punctuating the quiet. I felt I had entered a movie myself. This was a double dip, triple delicious — I was on the front seat between my mother’s loveable cousin and his handsome friend, fed popcorn and root beer (both off limits with my parents) as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra crooned about colliding with Mars. What a swell party it was. Maybe people could actually have fun in their lives, make clever jokes, laugh with each other, make music together. Maybe. He told jokes on the sofa, the ice in his glass of scotch chinking as he laughed. He brought with him the sounds of exotic birds and the smells of brilliant flowers, his still-thick British speech deliciously precise, his wit intoxicatingly naughty. With her favorite relative in the house, my mother’s British accent and humor returned full force, while my father shrank further into the cigarette-sodden gloom of his Barcalounger. Dick seemed to like my presence beside him on the sofa, and directed much of his talk right to me as if I were an adult. I think I laughed more during his visits than all the time in between them. I did not know then that Dick was gay or even what that meant, that he was a painter who inhabited a hill-top hacienda with half a dozen other artists and dancers. Or that, before settling in Mexico sometime in the early forties, he had lived briefly in Hollywood, a friend of movie stars like David Niven. But I knew I adored him. So when he and his friend Pedro arrived one spring evening and took me with them to see High Society at the Frontier Drive In, I felt I had entered a movie myself. This was a double dip, triple delicious — I was on the front seat between my mother’s loveable cousin and his handsome friend, fed popcorn and root beer (both off limits with my parents) as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra crooned about colliding with Mars. What a swell party it was. Maybe people could actually have fun in their lives, make clever jokes, laugh with each other, make music together. Maybe.

In 1954 our whole family saw The African Queen at the drive-in. It’s still one of my favorite movies. Although only twelve, I identified with Katharine Hepburn’s character: prim and dutiful, her missionary daughter’s corset-stiff demeanor constraining powerful emotions. Bogart’s character not only saves her life, but also, somewhat like Snow White’s prince, wakes her, makes her move. A rough man, certainly not “high society,” Bogart has survival skills, common sense, knows how to keep the boat afloat. Necessary skills in a war, in Africa, in dangerous times.

I knew danger wasn’t limited to the movies. Two doors down, a sign had gone up saying “Quarantine,” and a year later the girl who had been kept inside came out, walking lopsided on a shriveled leg. One of my friends had spent a year in an iron lung; her left leg was no bigger around than the flute she played in the school orchestra. Knifings were a regular part of after-school life at Roskruge Junior High. Half the boys I knew carried switchblades. On the way home from the bus stop I suffered a severe concussion from a rock hurled in a fight. I remember stopping off at Sandy’s on the way to my house and vomiting in the toilet, Mrs. Davison at the door asking if I needed sanitary pads. I missed a month of school. Sandy’s father came home paydays whipping drunk, and often I barely had time to run out the back door before his belt was out of its loops and landing on my girlfriend and her little sister. Other friends’ fathers never returned from the Korean War.