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Today is Joe Bob Day and we’re just 91 days from Joe Bob’s Drive-In Jamboree. Sadly, we won’t be attending this year. But I did have the pleasure of haunting the inaugural event in 2021 at the Mahoning. I’ve been reflecting on that experience a lot the last few weeks.
That summer, @JoeyRockyHorror needed to stay home with our junior mutants so I was prepared to party like a solo jungle animal. No problem. I told a friend about the trip and she asked to go. She’s a horror fan and I asked if she’d ever watched MonsterVision or Joe Bob’s Drive-In Theater growing up. Yes? Cool, let’s do it.
Friends, nothing that happened after we arrived in Lehighton that unbelievably hot and muggy weekend went the way I thought it would.
“Wait, are they going to talk the whole time?”
“Who’s that woman? She looks so bored.”
W.T.F.?
Finally, she spills she only *thought* she remembered Joe Bob and the format of the show, and she just doesn’t get it. We made the best of it, but I couldn’t help wishing I had come alone because the Jamboree was a great fucking time! I didn’t want to spend the weekend trying to sell Joe Bob, Darcy, the show, and the MutantFam community to a non-believer.
My own Drive-In Mutant awakening was a mostly solo experience anyway. A completely ordinary tale of a lonely kid finding comfort watching horror movies with the likes of Joe Bob, Elvira, and Svengoolie. A couple months later I realized I shared this commonality with other Mutants while working on the MutantFam ethnography project. They too had limited success in bringing friends, family, and partners into the MutantFam.
Since returning to our screens via Shudder, Joe Bob and Darcy have welcomed countless new Mutants into this community. @JoeyRockyHorror is a recent convert and while he’s more of a lurker on Twitter than a participant, I love that we’re both part of the shared Last Drive-In experience.
So, what about you MutantFam? Are you watching solo tonight? With natural born Mutants or
converts?
Happy Joe Bob Day!
NikkiRockyHorror