Drive-Ins and the Transience Blues

Long phone conversation w/my sister.

Unless Jeanna can figure out a way to acquire digital projectors, the drive-in is toast next year. That would be sad for all kinds of reasons. I mean, I think Jeanna will be okay. Unlike me, she is incredibly practical and knows however brightly the sun may be shining today, rain is always in the forecast.

She wanted to sell the drive-in though.

She owns the assets, but not the property the drive-in's on. She's been on the verge of buying the property several times over the last decade, but she's kind of a hippie cowboy girl at heart and the idea of owing $250,000 to the bank rubbed her the wrong way. Plus what do you do with a passel of acreage in remote rural New Mexico if the theater goes belly up?

The town of Las Vegas, New Mexico has actually made the drive-in the centerpiece in various tourism campaigns. It's 50 miles north of Santa Fe, a very strange little town, magical in its way. But nothing's really there that would entice tourists to open their wallets.

I've been after her for a couple of years to create some kind of nonprofit "Friends of the Fort Union Drive-In" as a kind of holding company that could buy the property and the assets, hire her as a manager.

Now I'm thinking she could do something like that and we could start some kind of Kickstart campaign – not for the land, but for the $$$ to buy the projectors.

It's worth a try, no? There are only 18 drive-ins left in the U.S. Drive-ins are an American institution so there may be some kind of nostalgia factor that appeals to the popular imagination, especially among the Kickstart crowd. Dunno. I do know that no one's gonna donate to her as a solo proprietor, hence the need for the nonprofit.

I don't really know very much about starting nonprofits. I know Cineopolis in Ithaca did something like this though when they were about to close some time back.

A Kickstart would require a massive PR effort. I used to be extremely good at that kind of guerilla PR. Dunno if I still am. We shall see.

Anyhoo, that’s in the hopper.

Apart from that, I've got the Transience Blues and am looking for someone with a strong enough center of gravity to pull me back to Planet Earth. I feel lost in a web of other people's narratives somehow. Kind of like that old Wes Nisker tag line: If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own. If you don't like the narratives… Trouble is I do like the narratives. But sometimes I think I'm in danger of becoming one of those cartoon characters with a huge thought balloon over my head and nothing else to keep me standing.