Drive-In.

It was only one of those brain quirks I'm sure - not really a thought or impression, much less an actual idea.

Some recently sparked memory, perhaps, melded with the idea of "Monroe" - this place, this neighborhood, these few blocks along a busy Rochester avenue that I not only live on but dwell on. Some how or other, I began to conceive of Monroe in an ill-defined way as similar, analogous to or metaphorically - a Drive-In Movie.

And I don't know why in the world I should have.

Perhaps a bit of it is the old Monroe Theater, Show World - soon to be nothing more than a memory and, thereby, weighing on my mind.

It is my earliest association with the street I now live on and somewhat obsess over. First I came to the Monroe on the avenue that happened to bear the same name. I came for the movies and strayed across the street to Gitsis' Hots.

As the thing now stands, the old Theater's bare north wall, I suppose, might even suggest one of those theater screens other-worldly large and incongruously set out-of-doors and nightly prayed to by productions of Ford and GM and Chrysler.

In the night the building fronts of any or all of the old brick buildings that make up so much of these few blocks might do as screens with the light and color, the shadows of the street projected on them, held between them beneath mostly moon and star obscured city skies. Unlike the looming white Drive-In screens of memory that were all silent suburban monstrosities by day, the Boardman across the way with its pale brown brick, the Berkshire further up and the Public Library above all take the morning light bravely and well no matter the weather or season. The Cornell on the corner is a sundowner waiting out the passing of the light to preside nightly over chaos and cheer, over the street scenes at Lola's and Oxford's with a gothic and judgmental grimness on its face. The street's shops, boutiques and eateries and their daily crowds of customers are all a show, full of comedy and action through every hour of the day. It's bars and bar crowds are nightly even more so - taking the production almost to dawn.

Stage sets, then, if not projection-screens.

But that - film projected on a screen - that wasn't even the image that didn't come to my waking mind as this quirk, this notion began to bother me.

It is more that Monroe is - despite the fact of so many of us living along it, on it, within it - Monroe is a place that people come to, drive-in to for their entertainment and amusement.

The Drive-In Theatre of memory was never a space of undistracted film enjoyment. The orderly arrangement of parked cars beneath and before looming living images set against a night sky was never with out late arriving and early departing traffic like that that is a Monroe constant.

There was always, also, a restless foot traffic among the acres of autos.

Bicycle and skate board kids might do for the bore and antsy young who, first, loosed themselves from family sedans and vans and, then, found one another to run riot with. Gawkers only out to take in the Goths and Geeks, the Panhandlers and Creeps for laughs could be the loud crowd draped over one or two second-hand cars an aisle back shouting their own dialogue at the screen and roaring at their wit.

Leaving the bars after midnight, some couples will always find doorways and even less obscure substitutes for the backseats of cars. PDAs, afternoons and evenings, make, at times, Monroe as much a Passion-Pit as any Star-Lite Theatre ever was.

Dog Town is nearly the perfect concession stand reborn.

Add to it a projection booth and stalk its parking lot about with gun-metal gray stanchions bearing cable fed squawk-boxes, have some pimply-faced teen concessionaires in uniform service caps and add to the menu thin crusted pizza pies and pop-corn - and you'd have the Star-Lite food service to the life.

Ultimately, all of this is only an over stretched metaphor. Maybe, after all, I am only anticipating Summer - with memories of one of yesteryear's symbols of the season.

May 28, 2008.