Drive in

It may surprise you but there is still a drive in in Brisbane.  Amazing!

It is run by a church as a mission project.  I was kind of wondering how they intended to convert us and was somewhat worried as we queued at what was once the entry gate and a I sure well meaning woman was talking to each car.  I thought we might be subjected to the "brother are you saved" speech.  By the time I reached the gate I was slightly annoyed by the seemingly irrelevant delay that I had been subjected to.  Turned out she was trying to entice drivers into purchasing a discount voucher for the cafe.  I figured that was Megan's domain and so shut down the conversation.  I suspect that disappointed the lady but....

The first movie was "Tangled".  Targeted at the kids it is a Disney retelling of the Rapunzel story with the usual Disney replaces the evil absent parent undertones.  Eventually Rapunzel engages in some teenage rebellion, sneaking out against her 'mothers' wishes.  later, in true Disney style, we discover her mother was not really her mother.

At intermission, Dan wanted to see the projector.  I did too so we walked up to the snack bar and there in all their glory were three dark windows facing the scree but either they were perfectly clean or the projector was hiding elsewhere.  Having gotten close to the freezer, Dan loaded alternate targeting coordinates into his navigation system and lost interest in the projector.  I on the other hand was intrigued and embarked on a quest to discover the location of the projector.  Maybe it was above or behind the snack bar and so I walked toward the screen turning back from time to time but alas no luck.

As I got closer to the front row, I observed what looked like a milk delivery van that was strangly glowing.  Ah ha I figured someone had loaded a mega video projector along these lines but was I in for a surprise.  Two 5000 lumen Epson office projectors.  One for the adds and the other for the video.  The operator simply opened one door at the back of his van to determine which one hit the screen.  Talk about low tech.  The audio was switched by un plugging RCA connectors and replugging to the new source.  I think he needs a two in 1 out HDMI switch with separate audio.  Anyone...

I had a brief discussion.  Seems they have paid $500 for a license to show movies in public on church property provided no charge is made for entry.  I guess they then just nip down to the DVD shop and pick up a DVD.  Before the Brisbane flood they had been operating as a commercial cinema and it was costing a fortune with ~40% going to Disney.  They even needed a government grant to break even.

It appears that the mission objective mentioned above is a training exercise and so the main objective is to get people to buy from the cafeteria so as to give the cafeteria staff someone to play shop with.  I gather they now manage that objective without government money.  Turns out that as a result of the Brisbane flood that the government funds dried up as they were redirected to food recovery.  We contributed about $30 to the effort buying a family pack consisting of two adult sized burgers and two kid burgers, fish & chips, and another box of equally unhealthy stuff (more chips) that I drowned in BBQ & tomato sauce along with a 1.25litre bottle of Ginger Beer.  I was allocated one of the burgers and it passed muster.

The second movie was .... Hmm it had Julia Roberts in it and Tom Hanks and it appears that Tom lost his job and had to be retrained and went back to college.  It was very slow and boring.  For a while, I used my phone as a modem and surfed the net.  Paul produced a DVD player & screen and set it up in the Vito.  He then filled the vito with small children and closed the doors.  At one stage I made the mistake of opening one if the doors and the vito started to leak small children.  I reported this to one of the parents who though I meant that the kids had wet their pants but it achieved the same result as the parents dragged themselves out of their camping chairs and went in search of the wayward kids.  Our neighbour Chris had brought a bottle of red and so I sat beside Megan and sipped away on the red and worked myself through some cheese cake that Megan produced.

The movie finished and by this time there were several kids in the back of the ute so I ran a hay ride wonderng if going up and down over the waves of bitumen was likely to make any of them sea sick.

We all came home happy (even though the movies were pretty ordinary)