No One Makes Out at the Movies Anymore

Love: No One Makes Out at Movies Anymore

I’m making the observation of the circumstance that no one makes out at movies anymore…

I have to admit that I am a bit weak on empirical research. But, when’s the last time you saw the usher have to go up to the back row and warn them, ”Break it up, or I’m going to kick you out…?”

Or an enraged patron yelling, “Hey bozos, get a room!”

I can tell you that I made out at the movies like a fiend for many years.

I was a slow starter. The first time I asked for a kiss, I was told that I could have one if I scored 100 points at the basketball game that evening. I was in 6th grade. Of course, I was no Wilt Chamberlain, but I gave it my best shot. Coach Wilder learned a lesson about coaching 6th graders that night; he never knew what hit him. I nearly lost my place on the team and failed utterly in all my romantic intentions. Of course, now I realize that I probably wouldn’t have got the kiss even if I had scored the points.

Years later that same girl, out of the blue, moved into my dorm at college, a circumstance that defied any calculation. I got a kiss then without even having to play basketball or any other game, so I guess the breaks turned out about even on that one. The chance of making out it seems, like hope, springs eternal.

I learned to make out in California. Yeah, California -- some of this circumstance stuff is better than anything I could ever make up! On the other hand, my California wasn’t what you are probably thinking. We moved there in the summer of 1965, when a lot of L.A. (Watts) was burning like a trash heap. We wound up in a wasteland in the Mojave Desert, and barely got out in one piece after only 6 months. Out of all the enduring lessons I might have learned from that experience, probably the most important was how to make out. Ironically even though it was in California, I didn’t learn how to make out at the movies. There was this park, and a high school girl… So, my perfection of making out at the movies occurred when I got back to Texas, first at the Paramount Theater in downtown Abilene, and later at the Burnet Drive-In in Austin. As I write this, there are many who don’t know or don’t remember what eight track recordings or drive-in movies are (or were). The two most crucial implements of love that I may ever know… . God certainly does have a sense of humor.

I acquired a number of invaluable skills associated with making out. To this very day, depending on the status of my arthritis, I can unhook almost any bra with one hand with one flick of the wrist. I learned how to make a hickey on purpose, and how to cover it up with flesh tone makeup. As a technician, I could, much to my dad’s chagrin, install an eight track in any kind of vehicle; I could repair damage to a console between the bucket seats with brackets and a screw-driver before dad or mom let on that they noticed the damage and thus had to require an explanation. You find the inherent superiority of Smokey Robinson or the Everly Brothers over the Beatles and the Stones, and the movies with a lot of music over those with too much shooting or shouting. You discover where the new subdivisions are going in and from where you can overlook downtown. You develop this sense of perception of unusual lights or sounds, even in the height of involvement, in case of the cops or bad guys.

Most of all, I found out about girls, and about boys and about people – how a girl can make a boy do things and feel things, and how a boy can make a girl do things and feel things and how people communicate about things in all kinds of ways. If I close my eyes, I can remember the smell of her perfume or my of cologne (which she bought me for my birthday) or of the chewing gum we chewed and the tastes that could never be covered over and never should have been. I remember when the breaths quickened. I remember when there were nervous laughs, and nervous tears. I remember worrying that I was bad, or that she would get tired of me. I remember the utter joy when she kissed me back

These were the things that were to me like the lyrics of the songs I was singing along to, or the words that I read in the books I was reading, or the talk that was coming into the car in the remote speakers. Things that were for me different from bounce passes or double plays or grades in school or success/failure – or even Jesus.

Jesus dropped out of history during his make out years, almost without a trace. There he is, a kid in the temple, lost from his family, amazing the priests with his understanding -- then he’s 30, getting saved by John, acknowledged by God and tempted by the devil. For me, after I led the singing, voted on all the temple issues and preached all those sermons to mom and nan as a kid, I had no such anonymity from history, from God, or from Jesus (me or the other one). It was a circumstance combining a kind of freedom, a sense of uncharted waters of new circumstance and the undeniable urgings of my mind, body and heart juiced up on testosterone and other assorted hormones.

We moved from Austin to Abilene the summer after my sophomore year in high school; I was 17. I drove the rental moving van with my dad as the only passenger. I was literally abuzz from the make out session I had with my girlfriend the night before – the goodbye of our relationship. Dad knew, either consciously, or like another guy knows without really knowing or saying. And at that time he says the first thing (and, as I think about it, maybe the last thing) I ever remember him saying to me about sex. It was a communication something to me kind of like God acknowledging Jesus when Jesus just got baptized.

I’ve thought about that scene with me and my dad many times. I’ve thought that the timing was absolutely hilarious, or coincidental, or ironic or maybe even pathetic. Mostly, I’ve concluded that it was just about right. Sex was definitely on the near horizon past making out; my dad’s affirmation was oddly appropriate. More importantly, I believe that there are some things that a man or a woman or a person has to find out about for themselves, like those things I learned in the movies, in the car or various other venues in the early mid 1960’s. Maybe even Jesus had to in those unrecorded pages of his history under the stars that were there 2000 years ago… .

Jesus’ life exploded into manhood and into history. He helped some little people, pissed off some big people, frustrated everyone’s expectations and got executed. C.S. Lewis has written that you either have to believe that Jesus was the Son of God and worship and follow Him, or dismiss him as a lunatic. The Jesus in me has always been a little bit of both. Maybe that’s true about the real Jesus too.


He said:
“All you need is love.”
“Love is all you need.”

As I sat making out with my girlfriend in the back of a movie theater in Denver, Colorado, in the summer of 1970, watching “Woodstock,” I believe that I thought I had come to the same conclusion, though I was almost certainly hoping for better breaks than what Jesus got. At that time in my life, in my society, in my world -- not entirely unlike Jesus’ situation -- circumstance was swirling around love like the winds of the storms around the eye of a hurricane. There were executions and there were wars and there was a mighty empire abirthing in exuberance, excess, pure joy and pure agony. There were new cures, new hopes, new stars, new frontiers and there were new possibilities. There was revolution and there was repression everywhere all at the same time. There was good and there was evil like always; but, for the first time it occurred to everyone that they, the good and the evil, would not survive.

One of my best friends, an FBI agent for many years, always told me that the true story is always the simplest. Most of the stories I have been told about love, especially the love that Jesus was talking about, are not very simple at all.

I do know that I loved those girls that I made out with at the movies back in the roaring 60’s, in a very plain and simple way. I know that if that love was not all of what I needed, it was most certainly a part of what I needed and is a part of what I need today and will always need. I know that if Jesus never made out, he at least understood what it was about; like the way he felt when the woman washed his feet in perfume with her hair, there in the back seats at the pharisee’s banquet.. I know that the popes and the preachers make a perilous mistake when the ignore or repress or even condemn “making out” love in search for agape or something more clean, more pure, more complicated or more grandiose.

So, I’m wondering if I’m wrong about people not making out at the movies any more. And I’m wondering, if they don’t, where do they discover the important mysteries about how they are supposed to love God, love another and be loved….?